Tobacco tax takes in around 1.5billion a year so before anyone claims the state are in it for the money, no they are not! Source for this is: http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/tax-take-goes-up-in-smoke-200835.html

Unfortunately tobacco is not something you can just ban outright in the morning as that will cause it to go into the black market and in the meantime (say next decade or two) the HSE will still be spending an awful lot of money on health issues related to smoking.

Making them more expensive and less attractive (pack designs) is a good way of stopping new people taking up smoking though,

The first time a person is admitted to hospital suffering from a smoking related illness they should get the very best treatment to cure them combined with every support to quit smoking. After that however if they continue to smoke and have to be re-admitted to hospital they should then be charged a fee in line with the amount they spend on cigarettes each week. So if they smoke 40 a day they should be made hand the equivalent monetary value over to the to pay for their treatment. I am sick of seeing the same people showing up time and time again (usually with medical card in hand ) in our local hospital looking for help with their copd or other smoking related illness and 2/3 days later these same people are standing outside the front door puffing away. It’s the already hard pressed tax payers who are paying for their selfishness. If they can afford their expensive habit they can afford to pay for the consequences.

Is today really National No Smoking Day? Its getting hardly any media attention other than here and 98FM.
Very poor coverage.

ahh you cant beat a nice cuppa and a fag reading the journal.

HIQA, which is responsible for hospital admissions, have already admitted that they do not keep a record of who smokes and who does not. So the hospitals have no hard numbers on smokers.

Added to this is the fact that there is no illness or condition that is exclusive to smoking, so whether something is caused by smoking or not, is a matter of conjecture. Diet, exercise, stress, alcohol and hereditary factors as well as smoking, can combine to cause many complications. This is not to deny the risks with smoking, rather to point out that these are hundreds more risks with just living every day, and factoring out a single risk is almost impossible, so blaming it for all ills does not make for a good diagnosis.

The HSE is a basket case and as such, their figures on anything would have to be hopelessly unreliable. I have read, only two weeks ago, that smoking costs the HSE €1bn and not the €2bn that Chris claims in this article. It sounds speculative but the numbers from Customs & Excise are actual and they represent real money, all €1.5bn a year in tax from tobacco. If the claim by Chris is to be taken seriously, I suggest he provide us with a link to any study that proves his €2bn claim.

Finally, his figure of 14 smokers a day dying in the State should be seen in light of the fact that 80 people a day, (on average) die from all causes each day in Ireland, most from what is known as ‘natural causes’.

According to the above, smokers health issues can cost up to 2 billion a year, yet they do contribute 1.5 billion to that just by paying tax on cigarettes (according to that Examiner article). This tax take is lower than it should be and is decreasing as more and more give up and others resort to buying black market smokes. If we really have 2 million smokers in this country and put a conservative average of 15 smokes a day on each this would approximate to about 3.8 billion in tax if all smokes were bought legit.
A simple equation is to say smokers cost the state 500 million is not good enough TBF. The average smoker will die younger than a non smoker. That in effect means that over the life-time of a smoker the state pays less out to smokers in pensions than non smokers. So in a dark way the state benefits economically to the shorter life span of a smoker. Further to this a lot of people have private health insurance which they pay for themselves (although recent hikes are reducing this) and so many smokers will actually not be a burden on the state finances, as the will rely on insurance to pay for their care. This of course contributes to higher premiums for all. But, I mention this all to highlight that the economics of smoking is not that simple. Yes it would be great if no one smoked but economically there is very much an argument that smoking is and very much has been a net contributor to the exchequer.

I’m Sorry but they spend more on in because smokers pay A LOT of tax. If everyone quit smoking the government would have less money than they already do