Madam, - Seven thousand people die from smoking related illness in Ireland every year and thousands of patients are admitted to our hospitals because of the effects of smoking.
About 1.2 million patients are discharged from hospitals every year and Ireland's GPs carry out 22 million consultations.
As a politician and doctor, I am well aware that parts of the health services are collapsing due to the pressures on it.
Let's just give the smoking ban a chance; maybe it is a smokescreen for other issues, maybe we are becoming a nanny state and yes, the vintners have every right to be concerned about their livelihoods.
However, we desperately need to try and reduce the burden on the health services and reducing the damage caused by smoking is one way of doing it.
Every day in our hospitals a premature baby or a seriously sick adult is nursed through our intensive care departments using the most high-tech equipment and expertise available.
A stay in hospital like this can cost the health service up to half-a-million euro; that is the importance we put on the value of life.
The improved survival rates from cancer have come about because of access to better treatments that are highly expensive, and will become still more expensive.
Those of us with a responsibility for the services must try to improve the efficiency of the service. Getting sick and growing old is not something that we as patients can always control.
However, anything that changes our attitudes towards smoking, alcohol, obesity and lack of exercise deserves a chance, because prevention is better than cure.
Trying to distil this argument down to the level of denying someone the pleasure of a cigarette with their pint after a hard day's work is simplistic.
Finally, the role of Government is all about achieving balance in the different views expressed by citizens.
We may well reflect on this issue in the future and decide the restriction on smokers today is not too great a burden when compared with the future health gain of workers and smokers alike.
It is important to point out that when the Minister for Health, Mr Micheál Martin, put forward this proposal not one single member of the last Dáil voted against it and that included those members who promised us they would go to jail in defiance of the ban. - Yours, etc.,
Dr LIAM TWOMEY T.D., Dáil Éireann, Baile Átha Cliath, 2.
Madam, - The media have attributed the recent fall-off in the pub trade to everything except the smoking ban.
However, as was highlighted in the Galway protest, every smoker-drinker has always known that we were the regular spenders who kept the small rural pubs open and made millionaires of urban publicans, not to mention contributing vast sums in tobacco and excise taxes to the Exchequer.
Micheál Martin has dismissed us as a health menace and the Taoiseach has asked us to make way for the "decent people" to enjoy the treats of smoke-free, empty public houses.
Unless the Taoiseach can use his undoubted powers of persuasion to marshal this group, known as the "holly and ivy brigade" in the pub trade, to become seven-day-a-week drinkers, the public house will vanish as surely as the "comely maidens" who once danced at the crossroads. - Yours, etc.,
SIMON O'DONNELL, PRO, Equal Rights for Smokers, Church Place, Rathmines, Dublin 6.