John Crown (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The accusation is made that sometimes we sit here talking among ourselves and nobody is listening and no one is reporting. I may be feeling a little cynical today but I want this process to be something other than people sitting around and basking in the glow of a feel-good factor of making platitudinous statements about the way the world should be. We are not like a boy scout club but Members of what is still one half of the national Parliament. We have here with us a Minister of State who sits at one of the highest tables in government. We can do stuff rather than just talk about it. Let us do a quick report card on some of things that can be done that have come up in my two and a half years in the House.

As the Minister of State may know, I am a cancer expert in my day job, but first things first. We proposed legislation a year and three quarters ago to ban smoking in cars in which there were children, and there was great support for it inside and outside the House. It had one of its primary effects which was to lead to debate on the issue of smoking in cars where children were present. It had an educational effect in that people who did not realise the exact level of danger to which they were subjecting small children when they smoked cigarettes in a car with them present, would modify their behaviour. For the first time this became something people talked about. I am very sad, however, that this legislation is jammed somewhere in the bureaucracy of the Department of Health. We originally thought it would be in place before summer 2012. We did not get it in place before summer 2013 and I am not sure when it will be in place at this stage, but I know that the Minister of State, his senior colleague and a few others, by twisting the right arms and greasing the right elbows, can make this happen very quickly, and we can get it out of the way.

I have to be careful about this because the Minister, Deputy Reilly, is the best qualified and the best Minister for Health we have had for some time. I also believe he has been dealt awful cards and is trying to forge a reform programme at a time when reform programmes are difficult to forge. I know he has the real will to tackle the problem. However, we must be blunt about this, the only smoking legislation the Government has passed in the current Oireachtas is legislation to make it easier to sell cigarettes. That is it. The only legislation that has come through was the legislation the Government was forced to introduce to comply with the European Court of Justice and the European directives ending the fixing of lower prices for tobacco, which effectively meant that the Government was making it easier for the companies to sell tobacco products. I am not saying this happened for any reason other than for the fact that the Government's hands were forced into doing it. To try to redress that balance, one would think that the Government would give a very high priority to passing some legislation that would curtail the smoking habit.

We cannot have this discussion today and not acknowledge the appalling situation that arose when the Prime Minister of this country and several of his senior Ministers met, in flagrant violation of international conventions about the way that Government should deal with the tobacco industry, for a private session with the tobacco industry, which ostensibly was to discuss some issues which might have had some fiscal and economic concern but were in fact used, as we now know, by the tobacco industry, through the agency of a PR company that was well connected to the senior party of the Government, to enable it to get a message across to the Government, articulating its opposition to the Minister's laudable proposal to introduce plain packaging and other measures. This was wrong.

For us to sit here and say we are all getting together to talk about how we can modify lifestyle to reduce cancer while we are not passing legislation which would make it harder to smoke in cars with children and are facilitating the input of the tobacco industry in meeting the senior in the Government, is pure and simple hypocrisy. That is the only way to describe it. We need to have a clear, unequivocal mea culpa rub of the soap on the soul from the Taoiseach and the senior Ministers apologising to the people of this country for having had that meeting and acknowledging that it was, at worst, a major error.
Malignant melanoma, the least common but most fatal form of skin cancer, is a particular horror disease. The incidence of malignant melanoma in Ireland between 1998 and 2008 went up from 400 to 800 cases and between 2008 and last year it went up from 800 to approximately 1,100 cases. This is entirely due to the fact that we were designed by God to live under grey, misty, cloudy skies. Our skin colour and skin defences against the sun are not adequate to give us good protection when we get higher levels of sunlight and we now get the higher levels of sunlight for reasons relating to travel, etc. It is a real problem in Ireland. The cancer, which according to the international legislature is considered an uncommon cancer, is a relatively common cancer in Ireland. We are probably looking at 300 to 400 deaths per year in Ireland if current trends continue over the next few years, which would put it in the same league, although somewhat fewer, in terms of the number of deaths as breast cancer. It is a disease which disproportionately affects younger people, so what can we do?

The first thing we need to do is to introduce legislation to deal with the use of sunbeds. Rather than talking, waffling and sprouting rameis about telling people to cut down on their calories, which is important, we have it in our power in this House to bring in legislation to severely curtail and possibly to ban sunbed use, certainly to ban sunbed use by people who are under the age of 18, and to have the strictest of controls over the way sunbed services are delivered in this country. Parenthetically, I also mentioned that it was not about setting up a bureaucracy called the NCCP, or about centralising or saying we will make the tractors here and deliver them locally the way that was done in the Urals. I was probably too late for that comment to have any impact on the Minister, Deputy Noonan, who is the individual who deserves the most credit in the history of this country for improving cancer services. This is about appointing a few extra doctors whereby people could see a doctor who was a cancer specialist. It was the Minister, Deputy Noonan, who - I say this in the best spirit, imitation is the most sincere form of flattery - lifted a line from a speech of mine in 1994 in which I said there were hospitals in this country to which I would not let a relative of mine go if they had cancer. The Minister acted on that and he set about trying to appoint people. I probably approached the Minister too late in the budgetary cycle last year to remove VAT from sunblock products. Sunblock is currently taxed as if it is a discretionary cosmetic item, but it is a medicinal item. If we are serious about reducing the incidence of skin cancer and cancers in general in this country, there is no way around it. We have to tackle the problems of melanoma and sunbeds. We cannot block people from going on sun holidays although we can educate them . We can tackle the use of sunbeds with the speedy introduction of legislation and we can drop VAT from sunblock.

What of alcohol? It is a strange phenomena that this Chamber, probably uniquely in the world, allows three different groups of alcohol vendors to be nominating bodies for one half of our national Parliament. I understand there are complex historical reasons for that, but it is not appropriate. In the event that the Seanad is preserved, I would hope that there would be a commitment from the Government to introduce reform, along the lines of my Bill, which would take these rather obscure nominating bodies out of the way and completely democratise not only the electoral process but the nomination process. We need to have a really serious think about alcohol. We have to understand that everybody who makes their living selling alcohol is our adversary in public health.

They are not our partners. They are our adversaries. Like many people, I enjoy a drink. I am not being personal or moral about it. I am saying that as a point of public policy, our goal as a society is to reduce alcohol consumption. Their goal is to sell more alcohol. Regardless of how these companies try to couch their activities, for example, in terms of quasi-governed responsibility partnership campaigns, they are there for one reason. If my pension fund was tied up in businesses involved in flogging booze, I would not want them to do anything else. We should not see them as partners. We should see them as our adversaries and we should curtail their activities. Our business is to put them out of business - pure and simple - and that is what we should be aiming to do. We need to examine, independently of the alcohol industry, the way we govern the alcohol problem in this country. We should encourage no drinking, or else responsible drinking. We cannot believe that these people are our partners in this initiative.

I would like to list some of the things that would happen if we all stopped drinking. Liver disease would become uncommon. Five or six of the most common cancers would become substantially less common. Waiting lists in our health service would probably disappear. Our accident and emergency units would be much more manageable. Far more discretionary money would be available to families to spend on their children's food, clothing, education and cultural activities, etc. Parents would have far more time for parenting their children, rather than spending their time drinking. All of the arguments in favour of taking action in this area are overwhelming. One of the big arguments relates to cancer.

It is important to transmit the right message with regard to diet and obesity. It is easy for us to pick targets from some obscure part of the foreign chemical industry that makes food additives or trans fats. We sometimes tend to forget that this country's biggest obesity problems do not necessarily come from eating bad foods; they come from eating too much food. I probably take 20 dietary histories a week in the course of my day job. They provide overwhelming evidence that many people are struggling with their weight not because they eat nachos with cheese, etc. - although many of them do - but because they eat too much bread, too many potatoes, too much sugar and too many scones, etc. We need to have a serious think about the implications it will have for certain parts of our own food industry when we start having a serious think about tackling food.

I compliment my colleagues for introducing this initiative. If it is a case of aphoristic waffle delivered in a fairly empty Chamber, getting no coverage and with no actual action coming from it, I suggest it will provide yet another soundbite for the "abolish the Seanad" campaign. When the Minister of State leaves this House today, I ask him to focus on getting the Protection of Children’s Health from Tobacco Smoke Bill 2012 passed, on bringing further legislation through to tighten up on tobacco in general, on regulating sunbeds and banning their use by young children and on ensuring next month's budget provides for sunblock products to be subject to no VAT or the medicinal rate of VAT.