A number of housing estates in the northeast where smoking rates are more than twice the national average have been targeted as part of a new initiative aimed at helping people in disadvantaged areas kick the habit.
The pilot project involves training community workers already working in the seven estates, where more than 50 per cent are smokers, to enable them to encourage residents to stop smoking.
The initiative is jointly run by the Health Service Executive (HSE) North East region and the Irish Cancer Society.
Róisín Lowry, regional officer for smoking prevention with the HSE in the northeast, outlined how the programme worked at a conference in Dublin yesterday organised to mark World No Tobacco Day.
"We trained and we employed lay health advocates to work in the estates," she said. "These were people already in the estates as community workers or in the towns where these estates were as community workers. They were trained in smoking-cessation techniques. They had an intensive four-day training programme.
"They worked on average 24 hours a week in each of the estates and they gave smoking-cessation information and support to people who wanted to quit and to people who didn't want to quit."
More than 2,000 people have accessed the project since it began last June. "We know that people have moved from not thinking about quitting smoking to thinking about it, and we have at least 24 people who are still off cigarettes a year later," she said.
"We also have people in the estates who have quit smoking that haven't come back to us and said they have quit."
Norma Cronin of the Irish Cancer Society, which organised the conference, said there was a high prevalence of smoking in lower-socioeconomic groups. and the society would like to see the project rolled out to other areas.
Prof Gerard Hastings, director of the centre for tobacco control research at the University of Stirling and Open University, Scotland, said it was appalling to hear the Republic held millions of euro worth of shares in tobacco companies through the National Pensions Reserve Fund. However, he conceded that tobacco shares were a good investment.
Figures issued to mark World No Tobacco Day indicate an estimated 1.3 billion smokers worldwide, with an annual death toll of 4.9 million. If these patterns continue, the number of deaths will increase to 10 million by 2020.