Gerry Collins, A father-of-three who appeared in a hard-hitting HSE anti-smoking campaign in which he talked about his terminal lung cancer, has died of his illness.
The 57-year-old died in his sleep surrounded by his family on Sunday morning.
Gerry, a businessman who had been a coach at Dublin GAA club Kilmacud Crokes, had originally appeared in an ad in 2011 to encourage people to stop smoking. In the video, he spoke about how he had survived throat cancer after smoking up to 60 cigarettes a day for many years before giving up, and encouraged other smokers to quit.
However just two years after the campaign ran, Gerry was diagnosed with lung cancer in the summer of 2013 and was told he only had eight months to live.
He and his family allowed the HSE and a film crew to video them over a period of several days about what it was like to be given his diagnosis.
In the campaign, Gerry said that he believed that he was one of the 50 per cent of smokers who did not die from smoking before his second diagnosis.
“I wish I was an actor [but] the reality is that I’m not an actor. I am dying. I’m dying from cancer as a result of smoking,” he said in the ad.
The ad has more than one quarter of a million views since it was uploaded at the end of December.
Source: Christine Bohan, thejournal.ie, 03/03/14
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