Jillian van Turnhout (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Minister is very welcome and I thank him for bringing this Bill to the Seanad to begin its work. As a member of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health an Children I had an opportunity to participate in an excellent series of hearings on the heads of the Bill, and I thank Deputy Buttimer for his chairing of those hearings. We heard from a wide range of witnesses, including health experts, advocacy groups, children's rights organisations, legal representatives, and representatives of the business and retail sectors and the tobacco industry. In preparing for each of these hearings I studied the submissions and presentations, and I will share with my colleagues the experiences I had of sentences repeatedly jumping off the pages of a number of submissions. The footsteps of the tobacco industry over certain submissions were clearly evident. Submissions cited many reports, such as the KPMG Star report, the Transcrime Factbook on Illicit Trade in Tobacco Product, LECG, the report on the impact of plain packaging of cigarettes in Australia, and the SKIM report on the impact of plain packaging on the illicit trade in the UK. All of those reports were commissioned by the tobacco industry.