Mr. Damien Peelo:

Particularly on Deputy Catherine Byrne's comments, all organisations are key to part of the education on smoking and the damage it can cause. I agree that we need to look at visual, graphic images to help in that task. Education starts in the home and there has been a cultural change. My parents were smokers. Smoking seemed to be a very normal thing to do and I am not talking about all that long ago. It is still in our psyche that smoking is not going to cause that much damage and that it happens to somebody else, but there is a need to personalise the effects of smoking. We will be trying our best to promote this approach.

Because ours is a national network, people with COPD go into schools and publicise the effects smoking has had on their lives. It is often a very big shock factor for young people to see people with oxygen and learn that this could happen to them as they get older, although with the age gap, people often think it is a lifetime away. Education is key in that regard. On Deputy Fitzpatrick's comments, all those facts are very clear, that COPD is a huge burden on Ireland's health service, both financially and in the personal lives of sufferers and their families. This burden can be reduced by preventing people from getting COPD in the future. One way to do this is through providing for the plain packaging of cigarettes.