Slowly, but inexorably, the tide of public opinion is turning against the tobacco industry and its lethally addictive products. It has taken long enough to turn. Native Americans were using tobacco when Christopher Columbus first encountered them, and Sir Walter Raleigh is credited with introducing the habit of smoking to Ireland in the late 16th century. Four centuries later, the very real dangers of tobacco smoking are glaringly apparent to most people who take the trouble to ascertain the facts and the duplicity of the industry in concealing and denying those dangers has become frighteningly apparent in the past few years.
Many of the starkest revelations about the profit-seeking double dealings of the industry have emerged from legal actions taken in the United States - some of them by individual states seeking recompense for the huge costs of treating smoking-related diseases, some by groups and individuals or their families seeking compensation for personal illnesses and deaths which resulted from smoking. The body of evidence concerning the causative nature of tobacco in triggering and compounding many different illnesses is now overwhelming and the behaviour of the tobacco industry in promoting its product and concealing the side-effects, is documented beyond dispute.
The report from the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Children and Health will be warmly welcomed by those voluntary and medical organisations which have been campaigning against tobacco for decades, with very little to show for their efforts. It should be welcomed by all who have a care for the health of future generations of children. Its recommendations are modest enough given the huge weight of evidence now available with which to condemn the use of tobacco and the behaviour of the tobacco industry. A ban on all tobacco advertising, sponsorship and patronage should have been imposed years ago. Government and relevant State agencies should certainly take legal proceedings against the industry to recover at least some of the multi-billion-pound cost of treating smoking-related diseases as soon as the best strategies for using Irish law to do this can be established.
The committee's proposal to increase tax rates on tobacco products by five per cent per annum until 2005 is too modest. Greater increases are required if children are to be prevented from starting the addictive practice of smoking and the proposal to allocate at least £9 million to anti-smoking campaigns seriously underestimates the resources which the tobacco industry can use to promote tobacco usage. The proposal to ban smoking from public houses, restaurants, trains, hospitals, schools and work places used by two or more people makes sound sense as a means of protecting non-smokers from the proven hazards of inhaling sidestream smoke from other people's cigarettes and would be bound to deploy a huge educative force in persuading everyone that smoking is no longer acceptable in confined public spaces.
The publicans have already indicated that the ban in pubs would be unenforceable. They must be proven wrong. Such bans have worked elsewhere where there is the will to enforce them. In Ireland so far, there seems not even to have been the will to enforce the ban on shopkeepers selling cigarettes to children. That must be changed too. The tide against tobacco must swell until everyone lives in a smoke-free zone. The health of future generations demands no less.
