Professor William Gallagher:

That is what the model of a co-centre or centre model facilitates. It allows for big activity around communications. We are doing this on a shoestring at present. We have done a reasonable job but we could do more. I agree we cannot just sit in our ivory towers and work away. We have to communicate what we are doing outside to the community.

On the plus side, I would probably counter that point that maybe there are some people who are presenting a bit more at a later stage and that certainly could be due to the impact of Covid, based on the data produced by Professor Lawler and his colleagues. We know, for example, we have had a dramatic increase in the number of individuals who have gone through a cancer experience and come out the other side. The number of people on the island who have come through their cancer experience and come out the other side would fill Croke Park at least three times. Many of those individuals are left with the aftereffects of the treatment, maybe anxiety or physical or psychological effects, and that, in itself, is a research question. Unfortunately, we do not have a survivorship research centre. It is a large-scale problem. We have some good smaller survivorship projects but there is not a big programme. The Irish Cancer Society had to put out a call for a big survivorship cancer research centre. Unfortunately, due to the reduction in funding in the charity sector, that does not seem to be coming to pass. There is a bit of a deficit there.

There are good models of industry partnerships. For example, I am deputy director of a programme called Precision Oncology Ireland. It is a strategic partnership programme funded by Science Foundation Ireland. It is funded in part by industry partners and charities, and the rest of the funding comes from SFI. There are seven companies involved, including small and indigenous companies from the whole island, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and big pharmaceutical companies. They are contributing cash because they see value. It is about peer-to-peer interaction. Interestingly, we are hoping to do a body of work with InterTradeIreland specifically to examine the innovation ecosystem in this space in Ireland. We know there are companies, both small and large, in the area but we have not done a comprehensive assessment of the value for AICRI to help push that forward and scale it up to bring these companies beyond a certain level. They will need a workforce. We have spoken about the need for a workforce in clinics. These biotech and pharmaceutical companies we want to grow to a certain scale also need a workforce. That is a big focus of what we are doing and, as I mentioned, we are hoping to do a comprehensive analysis with InterTradeIreland and use that as part of our argument.

I will return to the communications piece and give the committee an idea of what we are doing on a shoestring budget. It is critical that we get out into the community. We ran a programme called Science on Screen. We worked with the Galway Film Festival to do a 25-minute film that we hope to show on terrestrial television. The film tells the story of two individuals with a lived experience of breast cancer and prostate cancer, and three researchers who work in the area. The story interweaves between them.

A couple of weeks ago, I organised an event called Choirs for Cancer. It is an odd concept, in a sense. Over the past four years, we have brought together choirs comprising cancer support groups. For example, Cancer Focus Northern Ireland has a choir mainly comprising cancer patients or people who have been affected by cancer. They use music as a way of coming together. We invite those choirs to sing together on one day. We ran an event that paired individual choir members with well-known celebrities who have had some kind of cancer experience themselves or who have a family member with a cancer experience. It was a fantastic event. There were 700 people in the O'Reilly Hall in UCD. We do those kinds of things.

One of the challenges we face is reaching out to marginalised communities. We ask how we can get the message out. We have participated in a programme called Invisible Spectrum, through which we have interacted with key leaders and stakeholders in the Muslim community in Dublin and its periphery. We have talked about issues that may affect them. We know from data in the UK that marginalised communities can have poorer outcomes because of a lack of access to, and knowledge about, healthcare. We do not have that information in respect of Ireland. There was a recent study by National Cancer Registry Ireland about socioeconomic differences but none of that information was parsed to examine different minority groups in Ireland. Communication is critical. How do we do that, going forward? That is the reason we are here. We want a big programme that will allow people to specialise in that issue. I am not a specialist communicator but we do it anyway within the means we have. For us to do it properly, we need a team. It requires a degree of professionalisation.