I have already expressed my surprise at the complacency of the Minister in the situation which faces him as Minister for Health with the information available to him from many societies. These societies appear to be more concerned about the danger of cigarette smoking and more conscientious in their sense of responsibility than does the Minister. They appear to be more concerned about helping to correct a developing situation which has led to so much unhappiness, disability, sickness and, in a high percentage of cases, death.
I have been talking about this subject for many years. The Minister and the Department insist that the correct approach is to talk to the youngsters, to beam propaganda at the young people, and the Minister is particularly convinced that this is the correct method of dealing with the problem. Although we have concentrated on the children during the years when we took any action on this matter, the end result of the campaign directed at young people has been a continued increase in the number of youngsters smoking. The increase between 1967 and 1970 was from 31.9 per cent to 35.2 per cent for boys and for girls it was from 10.5 per cent to 18.4 per cent.
I agree we must direct our propaganda, information and education towards the young people but I do not know why we should consider that young people are able to exercise a control in this matter or to discontinue smoking. We know that children start smoking at the age of seven years and there is a rapid increase in the incidence of smoking from then on. The Minister does not appear to think that adults are able to stop smoking and I cannot understand how he expects that children will not smoke in the first instance or, if they are smoking, that they will discontinue the practice. It is totally unreasonable of the Minister to expect children or adults not to smoke or, if they smoke, to discontinue, in a situation where they are continually encouraged to smoke by newspaper and radio advertisements, by advertisements in magazines and by various poster advertisements throughout the country.
The Minister is well aware that this promotion of cigarettes is going on. He has accepted the suggestion that a notice be carried on the cartons warning people of the dangers of cigarette smoking—this has been done in the United States since 1964. In our Bill we have suggested that all advertisements in regard to tobacco products shall contain the information that cigarette smoking is a danger to health. In fact, I do not think the advertisements should be permitted.
This Bill is an agreed Bill among people of different views and I was very glad to get the co-operation of my colleagues in Fine Gael on the understanding that we would not ask for too much at this stage. What we agreed to ask for was a notice on the carton and the notice to be carried in the advertisements. Deputy O'Donovan, Deputy Fitzpatrick and Deputy Barry were right when they suggested that we should suppress advertisements which encourage people to smoke cigarettes. This is the obvious, logical and rational thing to do, but if we fail to do that it is reasonable that the people concerned be asked to carry in their advertisements a notice about the danger to health.
At column 1906, volume 254 of the Official Report, the Minister expressed his satisfaction at the voluntary agreement. He said that the main intent of our Bill was to provide a warning notice. Obviously he had not read the Bill because it provided for carrying the notice in the advertisements. However, carrying the warning notice on the cigarette packet has been met by the provisions of the voluntary agreement to which I have referred.
I do not agree that the voluntary agreement by the tobacco companies is adequate because it refuses to face the fact which we know to be true, that the most powerful single advertisement for cigarette smoking, the most compelling and compulsive advertisement, is the parent, the teacher, the cleric or the admired person on television who smokes.
I have given figures to show that the child of parents who smoke is much more likely to smoke than the child of parents who are non-smokers; the figures are 24 per cent where parents are non-smokers and 44 per cent where both parents smoke. The Minister and the tobacco companies ignore the well-established fact that the whole process of personality formation of a growing child or a young adolescent in society is an imitative one. It is seen in the behaviour of the child in many ways. The child of parents who smack him will in turn smack another child. The child of parents who follow a particular sport tends to follow the same sport. We know that in politics children tend to follow the political background of their parents. This is so widely accepted as the process of maturation, the growth of an individual child in society, that it does not need to be emphasised.
The individual is an amalgam of the mother and the father, an amalgam of their standards, their values, their customs, their practices, their behaviour, their attitude to life. The individual growing up in a family assumes these values. Therefore the child is the product of the home, the product of the adult, the teacher, the cleric, the politician, the sportsman, the sports idol, the pop idol, or whoever the child happens to admire.
I want to emphasise again that the Minister is wrong in his failure to accept this a a fact, as a reality. He must direct his attention to the adult and not only to the child. He must not ignore the adult. As I showed last night, he is quite wrong in dismissing the adult as a person it is possible to help to stop smoking cigarettes. There is a big difference between the person who has a systemic dependence on drugs like heroin, or opium, or morphia, and so on, and the person who is dependent on cigarettes. It is relatively easy to give up cigarette smoking compared with giving up heroin, or morphia, or opium, or any of the other hard drugs.
Incidentally, the Minister is completely authoritarian in telling these unfortunate people that they must stop taking their LSD, or their amphetamine, or their opium, or their heroin, which are really hard to give up because people become physically dependent on them and simply cannot give them up. Yet I am sure that very soon we will have laws brought in here advocating punitive provisions of one kind or another for the people who use these drugs and for the people who peddle the drugs, the pushers. The Minister is completely irrational, completely unreasonable, in his whole approach to this problem.
It is possible, generally speaking, as we have shown, if the information is made available to people of a particular educational or intellectual level, for them to give up cigarette smoking. We showed that in relation to the medical profession, in relation to the clerical, administrative and professional staff in Edinburgh University, and in relation to men and women in the United States, where one in three men and one in four women have given up cigarette smoking. We have heard it here from various Deputies who said that because they were convinced by the information at their disposal they were able to give up this habit.
There is no doubt that, if the proper educational process were followed by the Minister, if he were to suppress advertisements in favour of cigarette smoking and to begin an educational drive against cigarette smoking, together with the programme directed towards children, in a matter of time —and it would take time—we would start to see results.
The code for the advertising of cigarettes is so much humbug. It starts by saying that persons featured in advertisements should be obviously over 21 years of age and goes on to say that advertisements should not convey the impression that to be grown up one should smoke cigarettes. Does the Minister not see the complete conflict between these two proposals in the code? Nobody in the advertisement must be under 21 years of age—I agree with that—but everybody appearing in the advertisement must be adult, must be grown up. This is the very thing we are talking about. Because they are grown up, it is the grown up thing to smoke cigarettes.
The tobacco companies have been given the Minister's authority to circulate to all who care to read the advertisements that the grown up thing is to smoke cigarettes, that it is not a young person's habit but a grown up person's habit. All of us who have been children, adolescents and young adults, know that we spent our lives trying to grow up, trying to become adult, trying to appear to be adult. That was the greatest ambition of our lives. One of the manifestations of adulthood, according to the tobacco manufacturers, is to smoke cigarettes.
Most of the advertisements have an underlying sexual motif, the whole phallic symbolism of the cigarette, the whole suggestion that in some way it is a virility symbol and that, in spite of what the Minister says, there is a romantic connotation at the back of nearly all cigarette advertising. Adults appear in all the advertisements as cigarette smokers and therefore it is an adult habit. That is to be established by the tobacco companies with the full authority and blessing of the Minister for Health. He establishes that for children.
Then there is the absurd proposal that the advertisements should not over-emphasise the pleasure of smoking, that they should not emphasise inhalation or exhalation and that they should not exaggerate the enjoyment of smoking through facial expression or copy. That is completely meaningless. If you are trying to sell a product, you try to make it an attractive product to buy. That is what the tobacco manufacturers insist shall happen. The overriding instruction they give to the advertising companies is: "See that they buy this product. Make it as attractive as you can to smoke cigarettes." Therefore the idea of underemphasising or overemphasising the pleasure of cigarette smoking is completely meaningless.
The code says that advertisements should not present young people in romantic situations in a manner which would obviously tie the enjoyment of smoking to the pleasures of the situations. For example, advertisements should not suggest that a young couple are alone but there is no objection, apparently, to having a middleaged couple, or people over 21 years, in a romantic situation, or alone, with whatever ideas they might have in their mind alone and in romantic situations and smoking cigarettes. That is not objected to by the code approved of by the Minister for Health. So the code advocates the idea that if you are an adult, if you are grown up, you smoke and when you are grown up and smoke, you will find yourself in romantic situations and these romantic situations can lead to wonderful results.
Surely the Minister saw through the transparent hypocrisy of this whole advertising code by the tobacco manufacturers?
No advertising should be placed in school, college, or university media or in comics or comic supplements directed to youth.
Again, the dishonesty of this proposal. The daily paper, presumably, goes into every college and school. Weekly papers, news magazines, all the hoardings carrying advertisements, are all available outside schools. Colleges or universities have access to all of the magazines and all of the newspapers carrying these advertisements advocating that the grown up thing to do is to smoke. Is there any youngster now who does not carry a transistor set and who, therefore, is not accessible to the tobacco manufacturers and their advertisements?
These proposals here are not worth the paper they are written on. They are a complete hoax and the Minister knows they are a hoax and he is party to the hoax. It is disgraceful behaviour on his part that as Minister for Health he should ask this House for money to spend on dim and equivocal advertisements, at best, I think they could be called, in magazines and newspapers while at the same time tolerating a deluge of very powerful propaganda by the tobacco companies directed at these same youngsters and adults, of course, whom he purports to be attempting, and he now knows unsuccessfully, to stop smoking cigarettes in the first instance. The figures show he has failed in his programme.
Then there is the odd provision:
All current advertising and new advertising, before it appears, to be submitted to an administrator who will determine whether the advertising copy complies with the terms of this code of standards. The manufacturers have named a senior counsel to be administrator and have agreed to accept his decision as final.
Imagine a Minister for Health accepting that absurd provision as a safeguard for the establishment of a code, allowing the criminal to appoint the judiciary. Could it be worse?
Would it not be interesting to know how many of these proposals put forward have been turned down by this senior counsel who is an administrator and what, anyway, does a senior counsel know about the real process of advertising, of selling a product? What does he know about subliminal advertisements? What does he know about the appeals to the unconscious drives which are to be found in all of these tobacco advertisements, usually sexual drives of one kind or another, which appear in all of these advertisements and the way in which the message is conveyed in the advertisement? Certainly, there is no message conveyed that this could give you cancer of the lung. Certainly, you are not told that you can get a coronary from smoking cigarettes. You are certainly not told that you could be disabled, invalided, for whatever life you have left to you, from emphysema or bronchitis and that the average individual over 30 who smokes 15 cigarettes a day loses at least five years of his life, on average. None of that is contained in these advertisements.
Is that fair to the person who is paying for the cigarettes? Should he not be told this? Is this not deliberately misleading by the process of suppressio veri, this refusal to tell the truth? This is all done with the full consent and authority of a Minister for Health who knows full well all the implications of cigarette smoking in a community such as ours.
The Minister will not accept our proposal that the advertisements should carry this, admittedly very weak, notice which he has agreed to put on the cartons. He says he is disinclined to use any element of compulsion whatsoever. The whole history of control of drugs is littered with legislation, laws and enactments all containing compulsion of one kind or another and punitive clauses of one kind or another. Indeed, section 65 of the 1947 Health Act contains a provision for a £500 fine for refusing to obey a ministerial order about advertising something which is effectively poisonous to the individual who consumes it. Very dictatorial the Minister can be at time but where the powerful, wealthy, vested interests, the tobacco company, friends of his, are concerned, the Minister's moral attitudes are completely suppressed, the moral values that he prates about here when he is bringing in laws about the other, what he calls, dangerous drugs. Instead, his whole approach to this very dangerous, serious problem in our society is to put a warning notice on cigarette packets.
On 27th May, 1970, he said:
I have already considered the question of a warning notice on cigarette packets. I do not see myself readily departing from the view I have already expressed to the House that it is essentially a futile gesture.
Taken on its own, of course, it is a futile gesture and that is why the Minister is doing it, because he knows it will not have any effect on its own.
We are all agreed that it is out of the question to attempt to suppress cigarette smoking by ministerial order or Government order. Having accepted that, the alternative is, of course, very much more complicated and it does not simply boil down to a notice on a packet and then in ten years time the Minister will tell us that this was an absurd proposal and that we should never have done it because it has had no effect.
Even the minimal measures taken by the United States, Canada, New Zealand and other countries, and by Britain to a lesser extent, have shown some effects but they have been minimal, the problem being, of course, one of revenue. What is needed is an understanding of the problem, the seriousness of the adult's contribution to the problem of smoking among children and information based on the factors which influenced the rest of us, particularly doctors, whatever it was that made us stop smoking in spite of the difficulty of doing so, and the devising of some scheme based on those findings. It must be possible to find out why it was that we very ordinary mortals were frightened into giving up smoking or not smoking at all as is happening now among younger doctors.
The Minister knows as well as I do that this is a problem that has been seriously tackled by virtually nobody. I do not care what he may say, I think all he is doing now is paying lip service to the idea of dealing with the problem of cigarette smoking. Imagine the position if our daily newspapers, our radio service, magazines of various kinds, carried advertisements for marijuana, opium, LSD or amphetamines. It is completely unthinkable, even to the Minister, that this could happen, that he would allow this and then expect people not to use these drugs. That is precisely what he is doing in regard to the use of cigarettes. At present the unfortunate individual who is still a cigarette smoker finds that the case is made only for cigarette smokers, that the Minister for Health, knowing more about this than any of the rest of us, he certainly ought to, has the direct responsibility of doing something about it and he is doing nothing.
I believe the least the Minister should do is accept this Bill. As has been said somewhere, it would at least give an indication that we are serious in our concern and that we are determined to take positive action to deal with the problem.
I once again ask the Minister to reconsider his attitude to the second proposal in our Bill and to accept it in the way that it is in the Bill.