Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the delegation for attending. I do not have a legal background and I apologise if the question appears stupid. I gather from their proposal that everybody has a constitutional right to their property and if the matter ever gets to court, the State would have to prove that the objective hoped to be achieved will be achieved and also that it is more achievable in this way rather than using the string of other measures that are already available to us, and that in doing so it would have to be sufficiently important to warrant the interference with somebody's intellectual property rights. The objective of this is to save people's lives and to stop children from starting smoking, which seems to be the main objective of the tobacco industry. That is sufficiently important to warrant the interference. The measure of the Supreme Court case judgment would be the evidence. If plain packages are introduced on 1 January next, one cannot take a case on 3 January next because the evidence will not have been allowed to develop and flourish. How long would it be before the Supreme Court would state that it needed to give this six months, a year or five years so as to test and prove the case? No doubt a case is coming. What would be the timescale for the Supreme Court to state it needed a certain amount of time to see whether the intended actions materialise?