Catherine Noone (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will take some of someone's time. I am sure everyone will not speak for eight minutes. Arguably, we should have more contributors. I welcome the Minister of State and am sorry to hear that Joe is unwell. Hopefully, he will make a speedy recovery. She should leave whenever she needs to. We can chat about this again in any case. I thank her for her speech. It highlights how much benefit to the country is provided by the notion of preventive health. There is nothing complex about the idea of preventive health. If there was more prevention and more preventive health, the fiscal space would be far bigger when it comes to the amount we spend on obesity and alcohol-related illnesses in the form of cancer, heart disease, etc. I note the Minister of State said what the obesity policy is striving for and aims to achieve. It is a recent one and we need to keep an eye on it in terms of the way forward. The Minister of State said that no single sector or agency is able to solve this issue on its own. That is for sure. That is what we learned during our work on this report, which I will go into in more detail later.

I want to address a few points the Minister of State made. The guidelines are great and it is marvellous to have them, but how do we get the message in them across? How do we communicate it? How do we make sure that people are educated by osmosis? How do we ensure people who do not have the time to read this information on websites get it, regardless of that? Is there a role for teaching children in schools about food to ensure the message gets through to their parents indirectly if the parents do not necessarily have time to be dealing with this issue.

I note the Minister of State's comments about physical activity and I agree entirely with her on those. In terms of the national activity plan, it is vital we talk about the cross-departmental collaboration between the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport and the Department and Education and Skills. In addition, the Minister of State outlined the seven basic and obvious healthy habits one needs to build to be healthy but sometimes in our busy lives in this busy world we forget how obvious they are. I thank the Minister of State for her ongoing work.

This report came about through a committee of the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly. I suggested we examine the issue of obesity between the jurisdictions and the statistics on it, and prepare a useful report on a matter that I consider to be a major issue. Normally we would go to one another's jurisdiction, namely, to London, Belfast, Scotland and so on, to discuss such an issue, but I made the point that I thought that would be futile because we are all appalling on this front. We all have similar statistics. We went to the Netherlands and I will go into its statistics on this issue later. In terms of obesity, we rank among the worst in the world and we are on course to be the fattest country in the world by 2030, which is nothing to boast about. I have bored Members talking on this subject. I am looking at Senator Norris and I am sure he is sick listening to me talking about these statistics-----