James Reilly (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Chair. I welcome the Minister of State to the Seanad Chamber and I thank her and her Cabinet colleagues for supporting the proposal to ban smoking anywhere food is served, including outdoors.

I begin with the purpose of the motion and the rationale behind it. The purpose of the motion is to encourage the Minister to bring in legislation, either by way of a statutory instrument or primary legislation, to ban smoking outdoors where food is served. The rationale behind this is that on the good days we do get, people like to enjoy a meal outdoors and with modern technology in terms of heating, etc., it is more pleasurable to do that in this country. People like to eat with their families. A meal is a social event and it is something that as a society we would all agree that families should enjoy together.

In the first instance, those of us who do not smoke, do not wish to be subjected to second-hand smoke from people near at hand when we are eating a meal. While the evidence for the damage that second-hand smoke does in an enclosed space is well known, it is still factually correct to state that second-hand smoke, even outdoors, represents a health hazard. Therefore, why would people who wish to enjoy a meal in a smoke-free environment, want to have that meal ruined by smoke and by risking their health?

The third element of this which I believe is very important is to denormalise smoking. This is about protecting our children. We know from surveys that 78% of smokers start smoking under the age of 18. To those who would accuse us of being a nanny state and argue that we should leave people a choice, I ask them what choice one can exercise when one is already addicted by the age of 18. The answer to that is extremely limited. This is about protecting our children from experiencing smoke, from seeing smoking as a normal habit and being exposed to that habit.

To recap on all the things that have been done over the years: there was the ban on smoking in the workplace; the banning of sales of one and two cigarettes to packs of five, ten and now 20; the ban on advertising; the ban on point of sale advertising; and the battle we had as a nation being threatened by multinational tobacco companies for bringing in plain packaging.

Not one of these things on its own succeeds in reducing smoking to the level we want to reduce it to in this country. It is a combination and this is yet another step towards that. If we can create a scenario where children do not know about smoking, do not experience smoking, do not see smoking as being remotely normal and are educated on the harm and damage it does, I believe they will not take it up. When we were dealing with plain packaging I asked the Irish Cancer Society to do a study, which it did. We already had an advertisement showing how young children were fascinated by the packets as they were shiny and nice. They made them want to hold them and have them and then the cancer society showed them the plain packs. The children recoiled in horror and wondered why anyone would want to smoke, seeing these pictures of rotting lungs, amputated limbs and emaciated bodies of people dying from cancer, secondary to smoking. That is the rationale behind the motion.

There is precedent for this. Yet again Australia has led the way, but countries like Canada and certain states in the United States have brought in laws to outlaw smoking where food is served outdoors. In New South Wales there is a no smoking in commercial outdoor dining areas Bill. I talked about any seated dining area, within 4 m of a seated dining area on a licensed premises or within 10 m of a food fair stall. We are not doing something completely new here. It is new in Europe for sure. We led the way in Europe with plain packaging and we should lead the way with this too. I have to compliment the Department of Health and the team on all the work they have done on this issue. The tobacco unit is a small unit but it is highly motivated and very effective.

I do not believe any conversation on tobacco can be complete without mentioning that 6,000 Irish men and women die every year as a direct result of this product. It is the only product that is legal, that we know of, that when used as directed by the manufacturer will kill one in two of its habitual users prematurely.In the European region, 1.6 million deaths related to smoking occur every year and second-hand smoke causes 890,000 premature deaths globally every year.

All of the statistics I have mentioned might just seem like figures, so I want to impress upon people that 6,000 families in this country have gone through the emotional trauma of losing a loved one. They might also have lost their households' main income earners, leaving them to face severe financial stress for many years to come and, especially in the case of children, disadvantage. We must do everything in our power to help smokers quit and to protect our children from ever taking up this killer habit.

I was warned in the past not to refer to the tobacco industry as "evil". As I have said many times, however, I struggle to find another term that can adequately describe an industry that produces a product despite knowing its killer effect and addictive nature. I believe the industry targets our children. Once someone is addicted, getting off smoking again is a long battle. The industry then moves on to the next cohort. If we can protect our children, this habit will die out.

As Minister for Health, I had the pleasure of launching the separate Tobacco Free Ireland and Healthy Ireland plans. It was great to attend international meetings and be able to produce a picture of the entire Cabinet, bar one member who could not be present, holding up that document. It was a cross-Government initiative to create a healthy society and our Tobacco Free Ireland document is an integral part of that.

I call on people to consider the current situation in the health service. We know the challenges that we face. I have seen some comments on social media to the effect that we should be fixing the service instead of annoying smokers and retailers on this issue. I have the following to say in response. While we try to have a health service that looks after those who are ill now, we would be derelict in our duty if we were not to consider the causes of those illnesses and take action to prevent them in future. I ask the House to imagine an Ireland where no one smoked or abused alcohol and everyone achieved a BMI under 30, if not under 25. What number of beds would we then need in our health service? The greatest challenge facing the western world today is not infection, as it used to be, but non-communicable diseases, lifestyle issues, diabetes and chronic obstructive airways.

When we discuss smoking, tobacco's ill effects and the cancers it causes of the lung, throat, oropharynx, mouth and stomach, never mind the other cancers it is associated with, we should also consider the damage it does to people's lungs such that, in their last ten or 20 years, they find themselves disadvantaged, unable to breathe, often limited to living at home, going out with oxygen cylinders and attached to machines at night to help them breathe. As such, this is also a quality of life issue. It is not just the years one lives, but the quality of those years as well. Consider the heart attacks, strokes and impact on the quality of life for people who had a stroke, as my father did. He was left blind for the last 14 years of his life due to smoking. My brother, who was 60, died of lung cancer. Despite being a public health doctor, he was unable to quit the habit. More recently, my 62 year old brother-in-law, a plumber, is gone due to smoking and lung cancer.

For me, this is personal. It is also professional, given all the suffering I have seen as a doctor. For me as a politician, it must be one of our main political ambitions to create a tobacco-free society by 2025. By that I mean a prevalence of smoking of less than 5%. We are winning, given that recent surveys have shown that fewer and fewer people between the ages of 12 and 17 years are smoking and that awareness is greater. It is up to us to keep that fight going.

The Department is working on an initiative of which I will be supportive, that being, the licensing of tobacco outlets. I would love to see large retail outfits like Tesco, SuperValu and Dunnes Stores stop selling cigarettes when they are supposed to be a provider of food, nourishment and nutritional goods. Someone should take the lead and stop selling. I want to end the practice of a single licence covering all of a retailer's outlets. Each outlet should need a licence and transgressions on that licence should be punishable by fines of at least €5,000 and the loss of the outlet's right to sell tobacco for a year. These would be real sanctions and I hope the Department will be able to progress them soon.

I thank the Minister of State for attending and the Cabinet and my colleagues in Fine Gael for their support. I hope that this motion passes and I look forward to the Department introducing a law to support it.