2006 IRISH SCIENTIST YEAR BOOK

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Dominican College, Wicklow
Josephine Delahoyde and Ruth O'Brien
Cigarettes — in or out?

Ruth O'Brien and, right, Josephine Delahoyde at the Exhibition

We decided to carry out a project for the Young Scientist Exhibition on smoking. How were we to do it? What aspect would be take? What approach could we make? The Smoking Ban!

The Smoking Ban was brought in on 29th March 2004. It bans people from smoking in the work place, and it was also brought in to protect the lives of others who do not smoke, the 'passive smokers'. For the project we investigated the effects of the Smoking Ban in Wicklow town.


We wanted to find out:

• Is it effective in reducing the high number of smokers in Ireland?
• Is it helping more families to go to a smoke-free pub and have a meal?
• Does the Smoking Ban affect young teenagers?
In our project we carried out a number of surveys on different groups of people in our locality, ie teenagers in 2nd year and 5th year, adults and business people who would be affected by the ban.


Some of the results were as follows:

• when we asked adults did they smoke, 54% said yes. We asked them if they would wait to smoke until they got home, and only 5% said yes.
• We asked the 2nd year students if they thought cigarettes were in fashion and 'cool'. 71% said their friends smoke because it was cool, and 20% said they did not smoke and could not understand why their friends smoked.
• We asked 5th year about the effectiveness of the Ban and 90% thought it was effective.
• Finally, we interviewed some publicans to see if they agreed with the Ban. 80% said yes, they agreed, but it also decreased their business. The strange thing is that 60% of the publicans said they enjoyed their work more since the Ban was introduced!

Our main conclusions were:

The majority of people we surveyed had a good general knowledge of the Smoking Ban.

• A high proportion of those surveyed thought the Ban was effective.
• The majority of people agree with the Smoking Ban.
• The Smoking Ban only affects adults to any great extent.
• However, the smoking Ban does not seem to have any majjor effect on the smoking habits of teenagers.
• 80% of publicans interviewed said the Ban had an adverse effect on their business.


Josephine Delahoyde and Ruth O'Brien, Dominican College, Wicklow town, entered the Junior Group Section of the Social and Behavioural Sciences Category at the BT Young Science and Technology Exhibition in January 2006. They won a Special Award sponsored by Ash Ireland. Their teacher was Ms Helen May.


This article was sponsored by Ash Ireland, a joint initiative of the Heart Foundation and the Irish Cancer Society.