John Crown (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for his continued professional and political attention to the scourge and evils of smoking. I believe he is a committed campaigner toward the goal of making Ireland a tobacco-free society. Like those of us who have been privileged to be members of our profession and other caring health professions, we do tend to get a different perspective on the reality of the evil that is this industry. It is an evil industry and we need to call it what it is. At no level within our body politic, be it local government, national Government, Legislature, Civil Service or the EU, should we in any sense be engaging with the tobacco industry. We should see it as an industry that needs to be stamped out completely, 100%. We should put it on notice that it is our intention to make the activity which it does completely and comprehensively illegal within a meaningful timeframe. This is why a number of us are in the early stages of a campaign called SOS 2030, the goal of which is to persuade the European powers that they need to adopt this as a fundamental principle within the appropriate timeframe. This is not crazy, bomb-throwing radicalism. We are saying they have 15 or 16 years to teach the farmers to grow something else, get the pension funds to invest in something else, get the factories to retool and tell the shopkeepers they had better sell something else because, after 2030, if someone wants to sell tobacco, they will be doing it on the same legal basis as the Cali cartel sell their products - it will be illegal.

Some will say there are precedents for prohibition having not worked. We are not advocating the prohibition of the practice or the growth of tobacco. What we are advocating is the prohibition of commerce in tobacco. People may have a civil right to smoke or to grow a tobacco plant in their back garden and roll their own cigarettes, but no one has an innate civil right to profit from cancer-causing addictive drugs. When I talk of the tobacco industry, I include everything from the mom and pop shop on the corner in the suburbs of Dublin, Cork or Abbeyfeale to the people in the boardrooms of RJR or British American Tobacco and the people who own the vast plantations in Virginia or Turkey. Let us face it, the business plan of the entire tobacco industry can be summed up in four words: addict children to carcinogens. If they do not do it, the business ceases to exist. If anyone tells me there is any civil, human or legal right to that, they are clearly incorrect. This is why I am delighted to have the Minister as our leader in many of our smoking initiatives. On behalf of Senators Daly and van Turnhout, I am grateful for his confirmed and explicit commitment today to ensuring the passage of our own little practical step along this way by banning smoking in cars with children.

While I can be very supportive of what the Minister is doing, I hear a noise in the Chamber today. It is a grinding noise and I think it is the noise of gritted teeth. I can only presume the Minister is not happy he has been handed the chalice of passing this particular legislation by the European Commission. I am less bound by the conventions of party loyalty and diplomacy than he is, so I will say what I think. This stinks.