Billy Kelleher (Cork North Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Mr. Fitzgerald and Ms O'Brien. When the Minister attended the committee, he made a commitment that tobacco control would be a central plank of the Presidency, particularly the draft directive. Mr. Fitzgerald outlined that there was a very strong tobacco control ethos in Ireland and that legislation here is very advanced. The difficulty we have is that 29% of the population continue to smoke. There are alarming trends among young people who continue to take up cigarettes. An even more worrying trend is that there seems to be a high prevalence of take-up of cigarette smoking among young girls.

While we talk about the directive and tobacco control in general, where is the Commission in terms of dealing with this as a genuine public health issue? As long as we have huge disparities in the price of legally sold tobacco across member states, it is difficult for countries like Ireland to use high tobacco prices as a public health policy initiative. While we support that policy, it creates the difficulty of illicit tobacco trading. No one in Ireland takes that trade seriously and Customs and Excise, the Department of Justice and Equality and the Garda Síochána appear to have turned a blind eye to it. I can walk out of here and go to the main streets of the city and openly buy illegal cigarettes. It is something we must tackle head on. Clearly, nicotine is an addictive substance and many will go to extraordinary lengths to secure tobacco products.

If as a health policy initiative we have high prices for tobacco but at the same time allow illegal cigarettes to be sold openly throughout the country, we are not taking our own policies seriously. There is a lot of evidence to show that major criminal gangs are moving into the area of illicit tobacco trade because the authorities are not taking it seriously, and if a person is prosecuted, they will not end up behind bars, whereas if a person is dealing in narcotics, there is a good chance they will get a custodial sentence. There are large profits to be made from this trade.

We have banned the ten cigarette pack and we are moving on this directive. I published a Private Member's Bill on plain packaging which I would love to bring to this committee. What scientific evidence does the Commission, the Department of Health or the tobacco control unit here use to assess the policies to be put in place to deal seriously with this problem? Apart from advertising campaigns and the ban on smoking in the workplace which is moving across Europe, wherever one goes one sees a huge cohort of people starting to use tobacco products.

We need to deal with the legal organisations, the tobacco companies, which have massive resources and which in the past have lied to committees of the US Congress, saying that nicotine was not addictive and not bad for one's health. These huge multinationals are making an insidious effort by changing flavouring and using subtle or covert advertising through modelling agencies and all that flows from that. On what scientific basis does the Department or the Commission analyse the market and trends to see what policies would work as opposed to the window-dressing that is the case now?

How many submissions did the committee receive on this issue?