Many people in financial institutions and even in healthcare are also involved in the "killing industry" of tobacco companies, a leading consultant has claimed. Prof Luke Clancy, respiratory consultant at St James's Hospital, Dublin, and immediate past chairman of ASH Ireland, was making a submission yesterday to the Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children.
"I think it is scarcely necessary any longer to ask the [tobacco] industry if they knew that their product was addictive, if they knew they were killing millions of people. Their relationships to people outside their industry should become more centre-stage," he said.
The committee was urged to go deeper into the tobacco companies than their CEOs.
"This will reveal, as the tribunals show in many other settings, that many of the same people involved in our financial institutions are also involved with this killing industry, and some of the people even show up in the healthcare business," Prof Clancy said.
Often when customers invested money through banks, they would be told to look at a portfolio which included tobacco stocks, Prof Clancy said. A director of a financial institution could also be an executive of a health institution.
Asked if he was specifically alleging that people who were involved in financial institutions were part and parcel of the tobacco industry, he said that it was a factual statement.
Asked if he was prepared to give documentation about the alleged financial interchange between financial institutions, the tobacco industry and the health service, he replied that this was a job for the committee, as it had the resources.
Prof Clancy called for a price increase in cigarettes because, as prosperity rose, cigarettes became more affordable to children. Advertising and marketing mattered, he went on. The time when an ageing, balding doctor told children that smoking would give them cancer when they were 60, or a heart attack when they were 50, should be long gone, he said.
"This image fails dismally when it is compared to a Formula One racing driver flashing by, or a distraught Bridget Jones smoking another cigarette through her diary," Prof Clancy said.