Sir, – If quibble-shouting were an Olympic sport, Vincent Jennings of the Convenience Stores and Newsagents Association (June 17th) would be in the frame for gold in the Under 450-word category at the games in Rio.
His letter has it all: raised eyebrows about supposedly less-than-accurate quoting of a press release, strategic doubt-inducing inverted commas, invocation of the spectre of criminal gangs and worse – in an Irish context – the scare-mongering of a possible field day for m’learned friends.
Mr Jennings will know very well that the Australian tobacco quibbling team – leaders in their field – have been over all this ground before. They have raised exactly the same baseless objections to any and all regulation of their immensely profitable and injurious trade in cigarettes and more specifically, to the plain-packaging initiative.
The Australian government, I am glad to say, stared them down and put an end to all their huffing and bluffing. We now have suitably unattractive packaging for a truly disgusting product. Of course, it is not the total solution to the exploitation of millions of addicted consumers by the tobacco industry, nor does it pretend to be. It is an incremental step that seeks to take the false shine off a very dirty product and so help to make tobacco abuse a thing of the past.
Ireland is to be saluted for its efforts to come to grips with the public health disaster that is smoking. Let’s leave the quibbles to one side and enforce a policy that puts the nation’s health before the grubby tobacco profits of convenience stores. – Yours, etc,
CORMAC McMAHON,
Tweed Street, Highett,
Victoria,
Australia.