Ms Danielle Gayson:

In 2012, we received funding from the Irish Cancer Society through the X-HALE Youth Awards for a group of 22 young people aged between 14 and 17 years in the Cashel neighbourhood youth project to develop a peer-led anti-smoking programme for sixth class students, entitled "Lungs on the Run". We worked hard throughout the summer of 2012 creating an animation, a programme and a workbook that highlighted the dangers of smoking.

In September of that year, four members of the group went to our local primary school, facilitated our programme, showed the animation and asked the class of 30 students to make a pledge not to smoke. Each student received a workbook and a wrist band to remind him or her of that pledge not to smoke. According to one teacher, the students took on board the information provided because it came from their peers.

In October, we attended a showcase hosted by the Irish Cancer Society to highlight the X-Hale projects and received an award for the creation of our animation. Due to the positive feedback from our work, we have gone on to secure further funding through the X-HALE Youth Awards to develop our programme further into a training resource pack and to train young people in other projects to roll out an anti-smoking workshop to their peers. Also in 2013 we contributed some of the activities from our workshops to a resource pack that the Irish Cancer Society is developing for schools and youth projects throughout Ireland.

As part of our workshop in the schools, we asked the students what information impacted on them the most and 25 of the 30 young people identified the images they saw and the fact that they did not like being a target of the tobacco industry as having the most effect. We felt as a group that it was important to work from a preventative approach to smoking and that giving young people the right information from people they looked up to as role models would empower them to make positive choices in their future.

One of the main factors that we highlight to primary school students when we run our workshop is that the tobacco industry must attract 50 new smokers per day to replace those who have either died or quit. Given that most smokers start smoking before they are 18 years of age, the majority of these new recruits are young people. Highlighting this to young people has been shown to affect their thinking about smoking.

Ms Maher will now tell the committee why we as a group of young people believe that the introduction of plain packaging is so important.