Sir, - Publicans, their staff and their customers can take little comfort from Phil Mason, managing director of P.J. Carroll (February 21st), as he attempts to reassure them by trying to discredit the scientists who conclude that passive smoking is harmful to one's health. Anyone who has studied the successful litigation against the tobacco industry in the US will know that attacks on scientists who fail to deliver the "correct" messages is par for the course.
The tobacco industry attacks the evidence on the dangers of passive smoking because it knows that smokers are reluctant to poison others.
As well as protecting non-smokers from the hazards of passive smoke, smoke-free workplaces and pubs help smokers cut down or stop, which reduces tobacco company sales and profits. This intervention by Mr Mason is not about health and safety - it is about profit. Any attempt by tobacco industry spokesmen to present themselves as being concerned for people's health, while their products kill 7,000 Irish people every year, should be dismissed.
The World Health Organisation has said that while the tobacco industry continues to claim that evidence that passive smoking causes diseases is controversial, every independent, authoritative scientific body which has examined the evidence has concluded that passive smoking causes many diseases, including lung cancer.
Our own Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health and Children, a cross-party body of TDs and Senators, has also examined the evidence and has concluded unanimously, on two occasions, that smoking should be banned in workplaces and pubs because of the harm caused by passive smoking.
Incidentally, if Carrolls wishes to work with the Government and others in trying to reduce the dreadful harm that smoking causes in this country by introducing "sensible" regulation, why have Irish tobacco companies refused to appear before the Joint Committee on Health and Children to deal with its legitimate concerns? - Yours, etc.,
Dr FENTON HOWELL,
Chairman, ASH Ireland,
Laytown,
Co Meath.