James Reilly (Dublin North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Senator for raising that issue because it gives me an opportunity to debunk a myth that is put out by the tobacco industry that there has been an increase in smuggling and illicit sales in Australia. There is no evidence to support that. There are studies, which the Senator's colleague, Senator van Turnhout, pointed out on the last day, sponsored by the tobacco industry purporting that this is the case based on four other studies which were sponsored by the tobacco industry to support its case. The reality is that 13% of cigarettes are thought to be illegal in this country. Only 1% of that 13% is counterfeit, the rest is contraband, bought legally in other countries, produced by the said same tobacco companies with profit and then brought in here to be sold cheaper by people who are engaged in illicit activity. That is an enforcement issue.

I wish I had brought the packs with me again today to demonstrate the huge difference between the plain, standardised packaging that we are talking about with the graphic illustration of what cigarettes do to one versus what is on the market today, and the Members would see that with us being the first country in Europe to do this, smuggling would be extremely difficult because they are different from everything else that is available in Europe. That is the first point.

The second point, and it is a really important one that we all need to remind ourselves of continually, is that this is about a product that kills 5,200 people in this country every single year and 700,000 people across Europe. That is the core argument here. Those in the tobacco industry are past masters at pivoting away from the real issue, which is the death and destruction, consequent to their product, of families and lives, to talk about smuggling, counterfeit, contraband, retailers or anything else except the issue, which is allowing them advertise a product in a way that is particularly targeted at children - survey after survey shows that 78% of smokers start smoking under the age of 18 - to replace the smokers their product has killed or others who had the good fortune to be able to give it up. It is a highly addictive habit and very difficult for people to quit, even to the point that, as I have said previously, my own brother a doctor, an epidemiologist, could not quit them even though they were killing him.

We must never forget that this is about protecting our children above all else, because we have a duty of care to them. We can talk about all those other issues but we must never forget the core one, which the tobacco companies would dearly love us to forget about and take us up culs-de-sac elsewhere. That has been their modus operandifor decades and will continue to be. Any Member who had the opportunity to watch Peter Taylor’s recent programme on BBC, “Burning Desire: The Seduction of Smoking”, would have seen what the tobacco industry did in the West over the past 30 years, it is now doing in developing countries, namely, making children addicted to cigarettes.
The Revenue Commissioners will now have a highly sophisticated stamp on packets, which will be extraordinarily difficult to tamper with and which will help distinguish between legal and illegal products. It is quite happy this measure will not lead to any increase in the illicit cigarette trade.