Disabled group angered by cigarette rumour

CIGARETTE companies and the Irish Wheelchair Association have been inundated with calls from smokers about a false rumour to do with tax stamps on cigarette packs.

Smokers and non-smokers alike have been collecting the stamps in the mistaken belief that for every 10,000 stamps a wheelchair would be provided for a disabled person.

Apparently undaunted by the illogical nature of the rumour, individuals and groups in Cork and Dublin have collected thousands of stamps. A school in Kilkenny was also reported on RTE radio's Gay Byrne Show to be collecting the stamps for a wheelchair.

Mr Flor O'Mahony of the Irish Tobacco Manufacturers' Advisory Committee (ITMAC) said yesterday that the committee first heard about two weeks before Christmas that people were collecting the tax stamps from the back of cigarette packs.

The stamps have been put on all cigarette packs since last September as a means of showing that the proper Irish excise duties have been paid.

From March it will be illegal for cigarettes to be sold without this stamp and the stamps "make it easier to identify legitimate product from smuggled cigarettes, which is becoming increasingly problematic", Mr O'Mahony said.

"I gather things like this have happened in the past, but not on this scale," he added. "People used to collect the foils in cigarette packs and thought there would be some benefit for disabled people." But this latest hoax was far more widespread than any other and "developed quite quickly".

Mr John Dolan of the Irish Wheelchair Association said that every telephone call in the past week to the association had been about this rumour. "It is annoying," he said.

"There is good and bad in it. It is amazing that people can have such goodwill to collect but the dangerous side is that some people can be hoodwinked." Even if it was somebody's big joke. he added, "it is wrong to abuse people's goodwill in that way."

Last year a similar kind of thing happened when primary school children sent a letter to the wheelchair association. They had collected millions of ring pulls from cans for a wheelchair.