Obesity strategy - Long-term plan vital to tackle crisis

Two new centres for the morbidly obese are to be opened next year at Mercy University Hospital in Cork and University College Hospital in Galway. While these should, of course, be warmly welcomed, people should at the same time ask why this has taken so long?

“Some people see things as they are and ask, ‘Why?’” George Bernard Shaw famously wrote. “I dream things that never were and ask, ‘Why not?’” Why has society been waiting for so long for this problem to be tackled?

The country’s one obesity treatment clinic is currently in the Dublin area, based at St Columcille’s Hospital in Loughlinstown. But obesity is not just a Dublin problem; it is a national problem.