Health education - Still smoking after all these deaths

It is terribly dispiriting that almost one-in-three Irish women still smoke.

That this grim-reaper statistic stands despite decades of preventative health education programmes, millions upon millions spent on anti-smoking advertising, the sobering fact that one-in-two smokers will die of a smoking-related illness, and that nearly everyone of us has seen a life sucked away or squandered through tobacco addiction.

So many Irish women smoke that for the first time, more women are dying from lung cancer than from breast cancer. It is not sanctimonious to suggest that this is a huge social failure because so many of these women, no matter how much they enjoy the great pleasures of smoking, must know that they will pay the ultimate price for their indulgence. As well as that, they will add tremendously to the strain placed on an already overstretched health system.