Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 30 September 2025

Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement

Engagement with Institute of Public Health

2:00 am

Ms Suzanne Costello:

We would not have figures in that regard. Those figures are available and we can certainly try to find them for the Deputy if he wishes.

There is tremendous scope within the Good Friday Agreement around healthcare co-operation. There were formalised initiatives at the beginning and then there have been organic initiatives that have come out of patient need, community need and those sorts of initiatives. All of these have been very successful. However, what often happens in the balance between healthcare and public health is that healthcare is always urgent. For policymakers, the urgent sometimes trumps the bigger and longer term things. One of the things we try to do in public health, through the health improvement channels, is to try to focus policymakers' work on those long-term changes.

The Good Friday Agreement's scope for health has a lot of potential to do that. We can think of, perhaps, three things. There are challenges like ageing, which is a huge challenge coming down the line for both jurisdictions, climate and health. There are issues arising for health from transnational trade agreements. These are types of things where potential really exists. What we would like to see is a little bit more of a medium- or long-term vision around what public health could do within the existing ambit of the Good Friday Agreement. It does not often feature in that way.