Resist this corporate tyranny - Threat from tobacco giants

THE intervention of the Geneva-based Japan Tobacco Group in our Government’s entirely legitimate and laudable campaign to protect Irish citizens from the odious and often fatal consequences of smoking tobacco is as outrageous as it was inevitable. 

It is an unwelcome and intolerable intrusion in the affairs of a sovereign Republic by a foreign commercial entity whose only concern is the multibillion profits it can generate by selling an addictive drug that is recognised as one of the great plagues our time — tobacco.

The company, JTI Ireland, cares nothing for the 6,000-plus Irish people, or their families, who die from smoking-related illnesses each year and for them to suggest otherwise just adds hypocrisy to the indifference they already show for their unfortunate customers’ well-being.

This bully-boy affront to our democracy must be forcefully resisted and the EU must support the Irish Government in what is a precedent-setting public health challenge, one that would in time help improve the quality of life for millions of Europeans. It would also, eventually, have a positive impact on public health budgets right across the EU.

JTI Ireland, whose parent the Japan Tobacco Group has a market capitalisation over €55bn, in as raw an example of corporate tyranny as can be imagined, has threatened Ministers James Reilly and Leo Varadkar that it will take legal action if they do not promise by Friday that no further steps will be taken to enact the draft law controlling cigarette packaging. That threat came as the Dáil’s health subcommittee prepared to debate banning branded tobacco packaging.

The Government has long expected a challenge like this and Mr Reilly has spoken publicly about the likelihood of such an intervention. Our Government has been the subject of extensive lobbying from the friends of the tobacco giants, among them US and Irish business interests, who have argued that the draft law infringes on their intellectual and other property rights. It is hard to think of a more amoral assertion of rights as the implication, direct and unambiguous, that their “property and intellectual rights” should allow them ruin the health of most of their customers and kill one in three of them through a smoking-related disease. If ever there was a time when the common good must prevail over “property rights” this seems such a moment.

By lobbying the Taoiseach, the Tánaiste, and a number of ministers last week, the Irish Business and Employers’ Confederation, which expressed concern about the legislation and asked that it be delayed, has aligned itself with the tobacco interests in a way that shows them in a very poor light and undermines their credibility hugely.

Politicians with the courage to confront forces as powerful and ruthless at the tobacco conglomerates are to be praised, encouraged, and supported. This David-and-Goliath showdown is over the health of the people of this small island. The tobacco companies are indifferent to that and will do all they can to stop measures like those proposed by Mr Reilly because they know health-promoting rules like this bring the end of tobacco tyranny ever closer. The sooner the better.