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Tag Archives: John Mallon. Forest Éireann

The other side of smoking

By Owen Ryan YOU may not have heard of Forest Éireann before, a group that labels itself ‘The Voice of the Smoker in Ireland’. Representative John Mallon is currently touring the country to fight against plain packaging for tobacco products and when he came to Ennis on Tuesday, he introduced some of his arguments, some of them rather bizarre, to The Champion. At one stage he likened the treatment of smokers in Irish society to that of Jews under the Nazi regime, while he made some claims about the role of smoking in cancer which wouldn’t tally with the views of experts. Forest Éireann receives funding from tobacco companies, which is hardly surprising given some of his comments, but he says he doesn’t personally benefit from his campaigning and isn’t an employee of the group. He took up the cause around the time that the ban on smoking in the workplace was coming in. “Back in 2003 I was sort …

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