Niall Moyna sounds alarm on ‘Third World sporting nation’

Ireland is a Third World sporting nation. That's the considered view of Professor Niall Moyna from Dublin City University's centre for preventive medicine.

“The Sports Council have made great strides in the last 20 years, but we are still a Third World sporting nation – there is no doubt about that,” said Moyna, who played a fundamental role in Dublin clinching the 2011 All-Ireland title as both conditioning coach and sports scientist.

“We talk the talk, but we are couch potato sports people.”

As proof, Moyna, speaking at the launch of the 2015 schools fitness challenge, offered up a three-year study of 13,067 students spread across all 26 counties. It uncovered a high number of 15- to 16-year-old boys showing “early onset of heart disease”.

The stagnant nature of the Department of Education, Moyna noted, has continually crippled Ireland’s chances of becoming an elite sporting nation while also contributing to an increased rate of type 2 diabetes among adolescents.

Different world

“I think the inertia in the Department of Education is mind-boggling,” Moyna said. “We live in a different world than we did even 10 years ago, but we are not moving with the times at all. If we are really, really serious, we have to educate kids. And asking a child to switch on when they get to secondary school is too late.

“I don’t like the word ‘PE’ teacher. It’s got the connotations of elite sport and that’s only about 10 percent [of students]. The other 90 percent, we have to find a way of getting them regularly active.

“I would like to see dedicated teachers in primary school because if we can’t get kids to adapt their behaviour, it is very hard to change it. Then, when we get them to secondary school, we can educate them.”

Making physical education a subject with CAO points is essential to Moyna’s vision of transforming Ireland into a modern, First World sporting nation.

“I’d like to scrap the biology curriculum and scrap the PE curriculum,” he said, “then take the life sciences out of biology, the human element, and put it into the new environmental science course, combining PE and biology.

“Contextualise biology, learn about it from the effects of alcohol, stress, tobacco, diet and inactivity so they understand what happens when they do these things. Learn how they all effect our organ systems, because when you leave secondary school you leave with your body. You forget 95 percent of the rest of it.

“Young people think ‘I’m young so I’m healthy’, but we are showing they actually have clinical manifestations of heart disease at 15 because they are inactive and overweight.”

Schools can register for the fitness challenge at avivahealth.ie/fitnesschallenge before January 17th. The programme has been extended to transition year in 2015. Nine of the fittest schools will receive €500 equipment vouchers from Elverys Sports.

High fit vs low fit

Compared with “moderate and high fit kids”, Moyna said, the study found that “low fit kids had higher body fat – 23 per cent versus 10 per cent – significantly higher blood pressure and bad cholesterol circulating in their bloodstream.

“They also had larger amounts of plaque in their coratid artery, which supplies the brain, and the arteries in their body that supply the heart didn’t function as well as the moderate and high fit kids.

“You say to parents, ‘Johnny is overweight or they are unfit’, and it doesn’t resonate. You say ‘Johnny has a wee plaque in the artery that leads to the brain and that increases the risk of a stroke’, and they listen then.

“Hopefully this is a wake-up call, not just for our parents but our education and health systems.

“We shouldn’t be surprised,” Moyna said. “Twenty years ago type 2 diabetes was called ‘adult onset diabetes’ because it didn’t happen in children. In Ireland we now see it in prepubescent kids.”