The proposed ban on smoking in pubs and restaurants has been described as "hypocritical" by a US professor, who cited a recent study showing that air pollution in cities was equally dangerous.
"The same dangerous health effects - or much worse - are caused by second-hand smoke from cars, trucks and power plants. But we regulate those, we don't ban them", said Prof Kevin M.Leyden, of the University of West Virginia.
The professor of political science, who has spent two sabbaticals at NUI Galway, said he had "read with disbelief that Ireland plans to turn their pubs into health clubs" by banning smoking.
"I believe this is really more about intolerance than anything else," he said. "It seems as though there are certain issues that are easy for the Government and zealots to resolve," he said..
"Those are the ones that don't cost them money and where the opposition is weak, poor or too embarrassed to stand up for itself."
Prof Leyden, a non-smoker, said taxi-drivers were more likely to be killed in car crashes, and coal miners, chemical workers and firefighters more likely to die or be injured due to risks associated with their jobs than they would be from passive smoking.
"There is compelling evidence that second-hand smoke from automobile exhausts and other forms of air pollution is as dangerous as that from a cigarette, or more so. Your Minister should be asked about banning cars and turf-fired power plants."
He suggested that the Government could encourage non-smoking bars with new licences or regulate air quality in pubs.
The 2002 US study cited by Prof Leyden offered some of the strongest evidence to date that long-term exposure to air pollution in cities significantly raises the risk of dying from lung cancer and is about as dangerous as living with a tobacco smoker.
The American Cancer Society-sponsored study, carried out by researchers at New York University and Brigham Young University, examined the health records of 500,000 city-dwellers in the US from 1982 to 1998.
Dr Allen Dearry, a scientist at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, which co-funded the study, called it "the best epidemiological evidence we have so far that that type of exposure is associated with lung cancer death".
