Health and Sport Week keynote: Dr May van Schalkwyk addresses industry harm

Posted on: 26 March 2026

Head of School of Medicine Dr Colin Doherty and Dr May van Schalkwyk 

Along with her colleagues, Dr May van Schalkwyk researches the corporate political activities of industries including alcohol, gambling and pesticides amongst others. During her presentation, she acknowledged the positive contributions many commercial entities make to health and society but highlighted that the products and practices of some commercial actors are responsible for escalating rates of avoidable ill health, planetary damage and social and health inequity. 

May cited the now infamous tobacco industry quote from 1969 to highlight her view that there is a strategic value to commercial actors of manufacturing doubt and ignorance about the harms of their product:  

“Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the body of fact that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing that there is a controversy. If we are successful in establishing a controversy at the public level, then there is an opportunity to put across the real facts about smoking and health” – Fred Panzer, Brown and Williamson Tobacco Executive,1969.  

She went on to examine how the tactics used by the tobacco industry for decades are deployed today by industries to promote gambling, fossil fuels, alcohol, certain technologies, asbestos and more.  Her own research and that produced by many others dedicated to understanding and countering corporate harm, shows they do this through public relations, “health washing”, funded journalism, corporate social responsibility, social media influencers, industry-funded research, weaponing of “free choice” framing, highly sophisticated marketing, product placement and more.   

A question-and-answer session with Dr van Schalkwyk and Assoc Prof Norah Campbell from Trinity Business School was chaired by Prof Colin Doherty, Head of the School of Medicine, before the documentary Unmasking Influence was screened; demonstrating how commercial actors shape public policy and the pressing need to prevent this undue influence to promote health and prevent harm.  

Playing with ideas in the documentary, five people pitched ideas for transformative change that suggest another world is possible:  

• Gerry Godley from Breadman Walking talked about the role of sliced pans in healthy, sustainable diets 

• Paula Leonard, CEO of Alcohol Forum Ireland, advocated for widespread adoption and adaption of the iMark, an initiative to counter harmful influence by the alcohol industry, to prevent undue industry influence more generally.  

• Assoc Prof Norah Campbell highlighted the opportunity to tax ultra-processed foods and remove subsidies to the conglomerates that sell them  

• Prof Brendan Kelly from the School of Medicine highlighted how banning of highly hazardous pesticides in Asia have affected a drastic reduction in suicides and how similar controls on guns in the US are needed to prevent suicide deaths there  

• Martina Mullin invited attendees to reclaim the Irish pub from the alcohol industry through plain packaging of alcohol in pubs, increased taxes on off license sales and redistribution of those taxes to nurture Irish pubs as third spaces for communities.  

This event was the second collaboration of Trinity Long Room Hub and Healthy Trinity, preceded by their History of the Irish Pub event during COVID-19, an online lecture that inspired the book The Irish Pub – Invention and Reinvention, published before Christmas.  

Read more about Healthy Trinity’s work here.  

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