David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein)
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With respect, it is much bigger and deeper than all that. It probably would have been better if we had invited in the academic before the Minister of State, but she will get a copy of her opening statement and can read that. What the academic is talking about is much deeper than any of the responses we have so far got from the Minister of State.

We can all measure any action plan or action of the Government by the outcomes. What evidence of success can the Minister of State outline in respect of obesity? What is the evidence of the current model working? The criticism, as I understand it, from those who say we need to put as great a focus, if not more, on the commercial detriments of health is that we put a huge part of the focus on the individual and what he or she needs to do. That is important, given that we have to do all that and Healthy Ireland does a lot of that through leaflets and other promotions, but if we are not dealing with the structural issues that create a lot of the inequity, the health inequality and other structural issues, health promotion and individual action will not cut it. Can the Minister of State point out evidence of the success of the current model? How does she define success and what metrics does she use? We met an expert in the North, when we went to Derry last week, who is one of the lead researchers in obesity. He was quite critical of the health services North and South, across the island, in terms of our ability to deal with this issue, the resources put into it and so on. One issue he was talking about related to how we measure success and what metrics are used, and I do not understand what they are in our case.