Phil Prendergast (Labour)

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Áine Brady. I also welcome a former colleague, former Senator Kathleen O'Meara, and the team from the Irish Cancer Society who are present. I thank them for the work they do in raising awareness and thank them as well for the statistics brief they provided. As those have been well flagged already, I will not repeat them.

In my former work as a midwife in the maternity services, it was always obvious to me at delivery time that a mother was a smoker. There was a great difference in the state of the placenta after delivery and we would never need to ask the women. One could tell by the state of placenta because it would be gritty and infarcted whereas a normal healthy placenta would be no such thing. These babies suffer disadvantage from the very beginning of their lives because they do not achieve their expected birth weight targets and may have difficulties with feeding. The message about smoking in pregnancy needs to be reiterated. Anything a woman does while she is pregnant will have an impact on the baby she happens to be growing in her body. There is no reason to have a disconnect in that regard.

On my research, while we all were looking at the same websites, I want to focus in particular on an aspect of men's health because prostate cancer is extremely common, colorectal cancer, while it does not only affect men, affects them in many cases, and there is also testicular cancer. I looked at the website of Mr. Des Bishop, who was a good advocate for getting information out there. As a sufferer of testicular cancer, he was a good role model. He was a visitor to the Houses because of his ability to learn Irish and speak it so eloquently, and he is a good guy. People like him would do a great deal for putting the positive side of diagnosis and how to treat particular aspects of cancer.

On how obesity links into cancer and to ill-health, my colleague, Senator McFadden, and I are involved in the "Operation Transformation" television programme. The 14 Oireachtas Members between us have lost 11 stone plus in the five weeks, but it was mostly those on the other side of the House who were heavy.