Mary Moran (Labour)

I welcome the Minister of State at the Department of Health, Deputy Róisín Shortall, and thank her for engaging with this debate. I congratulate Senator John Crown on his excellent contribution, which I am somewhat reluctant to follow. I only wish the Chamber and Gallery were full because he has made the case clearly.

I recall, as a child growing up in Dundalk, the significant cultural and sociological influences on the community of multinationals such as PJ Carroll, then the largest tobacco distributor in Ireland, and the former Harp brewery. Every Friday the employees of these companies were the beneficiaries of free cigarettes and alcohol for their personal consumption. Some might say it was a great town in which to live. These perks were given out willy-nilly, notwithstanding the long-term consequences for the beneficiaries' health or for the health service. That culture has changed in the intervening years. The PJ Carroll facility is closed down and is now the home of the music department of Dundalk Institute of Technology.

The Minister of State and other speakers pointed out the frightening statistics on the health effects of smoking. It is the greatest single cause of preventable illness and premature death in Ireland, responsible for more than 7,000 deaths per year. Some 90% of lung cancers are caused by smoking and 50% of all smokers will die from smoking-related diseases. Smokers have an increased risk of cancers, heart disease, strokes, bronchitis and emphysema. Pregnant women who smoke are at greater risk of delivering babies with low birth weights. Smokers lose an average of ten to 15 years from their life expectancy.

The costs of smoking in terms of damage to health and well-being far outweigh the economic costs of tobacco use. Smoking costs the economy at least €1 million per day in lost productivity, while it costs €1 billion per year to provide health services for smokers. If we do not make progress at reducing the impact of tobacco in the next ten years, it will cost our already over-burdened health service in excess of €23 billion. To put it in perspective, that sum would cover the running of the entire health service for almost two years or go a long way towards building a new national children's hospital.

The introduction of a combined image and text health warning on cigarette packaging will lead to a long-term reduction in the number who smoke, with tangible benefits for society in both social and economic terms. We are all familiar with the Government text health warnings that have been included on cigarette packages for several years. These are effective because of the frequency of exposure. For instance, a person who smokes 20 cigarettes a day is potentially exposed to the health warning 7,300 times per year. The location of the warning means it is visible to the smoker every time he or she opens the packet. Including a picture of a diseased lung or any of the other proposed images can only enhance smokers' exposure to the health risks every time they light up and thereby act as a deterrent.

The most recent large-scale report on smoking in Ireland, Slán: Smoking Patterns in Ireland, found, somewhat surprisingly, a slight increase in the smoking rate from 27% in 2002 to 29% in 2007. This increase came despite the introduction of text health warnings on cigarette packets and the commencement of the ban on smoking in public places in 2004. Another worrying trend identified in the report is the increase in recent years in the number of adolescent girls who smoke. It is vital that we catch young people at the time when they are most likely to become addicted to nicotine. The Irish Cancer Society has indicated its concern that it is losing the battle to prevent young girls from taking up the habit.

As a parent of teenage children, I am heartened by the reference, albeit a minor one, to the dangers of smoking which is included in the junior certificate social, personal and health education, SPHE, curriculum text book. We must explore ways such as this of targeting young people. Most schools have an anti-smoking policy, but we must do more. The SPHE textbook includes four pages of text on the dangers of smoking and one picture of a smoker's lung. My four children were unanimous in their view that the image had a much greater impact and was a far greater deterrent than the four pages of text.

There are many reasons that we should inform smokers of the health risks of smoking through the use of pictorial warnings on tobacco products. First, an image is eye-catching; as the saying goes, a picture paints a thousand words. This is shown time after time in the case of children who have no speech or adults who have lost their speech through strokes or illness but who learn to communicate effectively through picture signing. A picture also crosses the barrier of language. For example, when abroad, a health warning in a foreign language may communicate something of its message to us, but a picture requires no translation.

Images are also informative. Research has shown that in Canada, where pictorial warnings include information about the risks of impotence, smokers were almost three times more likely to agree that smoking causes impotence compared with smokers from the United States, United Kingdom and Australia. In the same study 44% of smokers in Canada agreed that pictorial warnings increased their motivation to quit smoking. Pictorial health warnings on cigarette packages make the product less attractive and target smokers by communicating the health risks in a clear and striking way. Another vital consideration is that the introduction of pictorial warnings will impose no additional financial cost on the Exchequer. We are all aware that the adolescent years can be the most vulnerable. Therefore, it is imperative to target this age group when addressing the dangers of smoking. The effectiveness of coloured graphic warnings over other illustrations was highlighted in a directive of the European Parliament in Greece in 2003 where 96.1% of current smoking adolescents opted for the graphic warning labels as being more effective in preventing them from smoking and in informing them about the health effects of smoking in comparison to the EU text-only warnings. It was also noted that younger adolescents up to the age of 14 not only opted for the graphic warnings more often, but were also more likely to rate them much higher in comparison to their elder peers aged 15-plus.

The proposed EU graphic warning label, supported by other tobacco control policy interventions such as smoke-free environments, advertising bans and increasing the price of cigarettes, must play a vital role in de-normalising smoking and preventing smoking initiation especially during the crucial years of adolescence when smoking experimentation and addition is more likely. I recommend the Bill to the House.