John Crown (Independent)
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I move:

That the Joint Committee on Health and Children calls for a ban on smoking on the Leinster House campus.

I seek the support of my colleagues for the motion, the reasons for which will be obvious. There are 1,500 deaths caused by lung cancer in Ireland every year. It is far and away the leading cause of death from cancer and arguably the leading cause of death. In the absence of smoking lung cancer would not disappear, but it would become an uncommon disease, as would head and neck and oesophageal cancer. Pancreatic and bladder cancer would also become less common. Chronic obstructive airways disease is emerging as the source of a critical health issue and a colossal drain on health resources, as well as being a tragedy for the individuals and families concerned. The incidence of this disease would decline by 80% to 90% if cigarette smoking disappeared completely. Premature heart disease, premature strokes, crippling strokes and life-changing strokes would not disappear, but they would become less common. People smoke because they are addicts. They may say they smoke because they are exercising some kind of right or a constitutional rightm but the right to smoke is enshrined nowhere. I am not suggesting we ban smoking, but we do not have a obligation to facilitate it.

The HSE is moving towards a model which will be activated in 2015. There will be a ban on smoking anywhere on the campus of any HSE facility - indoors, outdoors, in corridors or carparks. Every HSE campus will be a smoke-free zone up to the gates and I am proud to say it has already happened. My institution, St. Vincent's University Hospital, was the first hospital in the country to take this step. I will provide the committee with a list of the hospitals where a no-smoking ban has been implemented: St. Vincent's University Hospital; St. James's Hospital; Portlaoise General Hospital; James Connolly Memorial Hospital; the Mater Hospital; Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda; Louth County Hospital; Our Lady's Hospital, Navan; Cork University Hospital; Waterford Regional Hospital; Galway University Hospital; Croom Orthopaedic Hospital; and the hospitals in Letterkenny, Limerick, Ennis and Nenagh. If it is good enough for sick patients stuck in hospital beds and hospital staff, it should be good enough for parliamentarians. It may not be immediately obvious with all the best press politicians have had in recent years, but we still remain some form of role models. My fantasy is that this could become the first smoke-free parliament campus. If we do this, we should also launch a major smoking cessation help programme for parliamentarians and members of the staff in Leinster House. It would be a wonderful flagship initiative if we could say the country that first banned smoking in the workplace also had the first smoke-free parliament campus and the addicts had all been cured.

The third and most important reason is we need to consider the health of the individuals who smoke. I do not smoke and cannot make a case that my health has been compromised by someone smoking in the middle of the carpark in Leinster House, although I find it extremely distasteful. I recently read about an individual who was a frequent visitor to Leinster House. In the course of an interview this person talked about their young children. I have never seen this person without a cigarette.

I ask patients to imagine the conversation they will have with their children if they should ever have to tell them they have lung cancer. They will say, with tear-streaked eyes, "Mommy or Daddy, you knew smoking did this and now you are going to leave us. Why did you do this to us?" I have had to give this type of bad news to too many people over the years and it has become a mission of mine that we try to deal with it as definitively as we can. People will say this measure is nanny-statism anti-libertarian tosh. It is addiction thinking and I speak with great authority, not because I am a Senator, a doctor or a professor but because I used to be a smoker. I know exactly what it is like. I know exactly what it is like in the morning to reach out stumblingly to the bedside locker for that packet of cigarettes. I know what it is like to feel that unbelievable sense of umbrage when somebody would ask me to step outside to smoke. I used to wonder why they did not step outside if they did not like the smoke. That is the perverted thinking of a smoker, the addiction thinking and what in addiction circles is called "stinking thinking". Every time somebody looks at one and asks, "How could you make us go out onto Kildare Street or Merrion Square to have a cigarette? How could you be so insensitive to my needs?", one must remember that all they are asking one to do is to facilitate their own slow suicide. If one really likes them, loves them or respects them, one will not. They do not have a free choice. This is an addiction. This is not something they are doing willfully.

I ask members to join me in petitioning the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission, the body that makes this decision. It will have great moral authority if this committee supports the motion so that Leinster House, like every HSE hospital in the country, will be a smoke-free complex inside and out.