The Health Service Executive (HSE) has appointed a committee to help increase national rates of breastfeeding by 2 per cent each year.
The National Breastfeeding Strategy Implementation Committee will help implement the State's five-year strategic action plan to encourage more women to breastfeed their babies.
HSE chief executive Brendan Drumm said: "Breastfeeding allows us to take advantage of a critical window of opportunity to impact positively on the lifelong health of the child, while also ensuring better future health for the mother."
Prof Drumm said the overall aim of the action plan is to achieve sustained increases of 2 per cent per annum in the "initiation and duration" rates for breastfeeding and a 4 per cent increase within communities currently least likely to breastfeed.
Measures will include improvements in standards and services for expectant and newly breastfeeding mothers as well as education on breastfeeding for schoolchildren.
The strategy aims to provide supports for mothers to breastfeed for longer, as well as improved facilities and flexible working conditions for breastfeeding employees. It will also look at regulating the marketing of breast milk substitutes.
Catherine Murphy, assistant national director of population health, said barriers to breastfeeding needed to be tackles in order to make it the "normal and easier choice for the vast majority of families in Ireland".