Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 3 November 2021

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health

General Scheme of the Public Health (Tobacco and Nicotine Inhaling Products) Bill 2019: Department of Health

Photo of Seán KyneSeán Kyne (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

That is good. The other issue is the subliminal use of advertising through the making of programmes, which I will not name, in Hollywood and elsewhere that are based on the 1940s or 1950s and within which every second person is seen smoking. That is a subliminal way of avoiding the rules. The majority of people do not smoke now, so perhaps James Bond will not be seen smoking but an equivalent character or ordinary people from the 1940s and 1950s are portrayed smoking. I have heard people ask whether it is as a result of the tobacco industry funding such drama series. Perhaps there is evidence of this, perhaps not.

It is interesting that three years ago in France there was talk about re-editing old movies such as the James Bond movies to take out the bits where they smoke. I was quite new in the Department at the time and I thought this was crazy. Now, three years later and after I have been exposed to the extraordinary damage from that product, this seems like a reasonable proposal.

There is no doubt about why children start smoking. Mostly it is because they see adults around them doing it. Adults must take the responsibility. The other bit is the glamorisation. There is no question that seeing role models smoking is a big issue. Certain organisations have taken this into account. Netflix, for example, has a policy of watching the dramas to see whether characters are smoking. Netflix is aware of that and has a commitment to reduce or eliminate smoking by characters. In the past we have written to RTÉ to discuss that issue also and to draw RTÉ's attention to characters smoking in certain dramas.

The advertising of tobacco and cigarettes is essentially eliminated in Ireland, but there is that thing whereby a 12-year-old or a teen sees someone cool having a smoke. Smoking itself as an action is not particularly enjoyable. We have the plain packaging, tobacco products are located behind the shop counters where we cannot see them, and the warnings are there, including the horrible pictures of the damage done. It is easy to see why people took up smoking 20 years ago a 30 years ago as they were not aware of the dangers. The current generation are aware of the dangers but are still attracted to the product. We must ask what are the areas that are left that we must try to shut down.

It is one of those public health tragedies. If we can stop someone from taking up smoking - and 99% of people have had their first cigarette by the time they are 25 - and if we can stop them from starting in the early teens to early 20s, they will never smoke and they will never have all the illness. How do we block off what could be perceived as the positive messages about something that is a hideous habit? It does nothing for a person except to make them sick. It kills two out of three people that use it. The only enjoyment that a smoker gets from it is the feeding of the nicotine addiction that is started by the product. A person does not get a high from smoking such as from other substances. It is just feeding the addiction that the product causes. To say there is nothing good about it is an understatement. It is expensive and dirty and two out of three people who use it will be killed if they use it as instructed by the manufacturer or the retailer.

It is to try to understand how a product of that nature, that has nothing going for it, is still being taken up by young people all of the time. Re-editing the James Bond movies so that Sean Connery is not smoking seems like a reasonable idea when one looks at the full travesty of the product. I am not saying that this is policy, just that it seems like a good idea.

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