Blog: Clearing the whiff of tobacco smoke from around the Cabinet table

Kathleen O'Meara, Head of Advocacy and Communications, writes about her recent meeting with the Government in relation to the tobacco industry.

We praise this Government, particularly the Minister for Health, for the commitment they display in taking on tobacco and trying to reduce the massive impact of smoking on the nation’s health. Sixteen people die every day in Ireland as a result of smoking. This is more than alcohol, self-harm, road deaths and strokes combined. While the rate of smoking is on the decline and fewer young people are taking up smoking, we still have a major public health problem on our hands as a result of smoking.

We were shocked and very disappointed, then, when we read in The Irish Times last year that the Taoiseach and a number of his Ministers had met ITMAC, the representative body for the tobacco industry in Ireland.

In our opinion this meeting should not have happened, for two reasons. Firstly, it is unethical for the leader of the Government to meet an industry which produces a product which, if used properly, will kill half its users, who are, after all, citizens of the country he leads. Secondly, because Ireland is a signatory of the Framework Convention for Tobacco Control, the first ever WHO public health treaty specifically designed to combat tobacco, and which seeks to limit interaction between the industry and Governments to only what is necessary, i.e. regulatory matters.

Therefore the Government had no business agreeing to the meeting. We wrote to the Taoiseach to protest to him about his decision to sit down, in Government Buildings, with what the Minister for Health has called “an evil industry”.

Last week, on foot of our complaint, the Taoiseach met us, in the same room as that original meeting, this time in the company of the Minister for Health, James Reilly TD and the Minister for Justice Alan Shatter TD.

So what happened?

The Taoiseach said he wanted to clear the air about the meeting. He said it had been arranged at the request of Bill O’Herlihy, the public affairs consultant whose company, O’Herlihy Communications, represents ITMAC. Incidentally, Bill O’Herlihy and the Taoiseach are good friends and he launched Mr. O’Herlihy’s book in 2012.

The Taoiseach told us they had agreed “only” to discuss smuggling and that we could have a copy of the minutes of the meeting. We have the minutes and because we believe in transparency, here they are (PDF, 314KB).

So what did we say?

We reminded the Taoiseach that the Framework Convention specifically limits meetings on an issue like smuggling to regulatory level, not policy level, therefore the industry should not have been in. We told him how the industry constantly overstates the level of smuggling and that the industry is implicated in contributing to smuggling. We asked the Taoiseach if the tobacco industry had mentioned in their presentation their manipulation of tobacco tax to maximise profit as well as the fact that they raise the price of cigarettes themselves at budget time, whether the Government raises tobacco tax or not. No, we were told, they hadn’t done that.

No surprise there.

And we asked the Taoiseach for support for our request around tobacco tax, because high price is working. It is discouraging young people from starting to smoke and it is bringing down the smoking rate. And the smuggling rate is on the way down. It now stands at 13% according to official figures from the Revenue Commissioners, not much higher than the European average. We have asked the Department of Finance to give consideration to a proposal to manage tobacco tax differently in order to take more from the industry and told the Taoiseach we would like to have his support for this proposal.

Time will tell if the Taoiseach was listening to us.