Ms Claire Gordon:

In the general scheme, we have not envisaged that it would be Revenue; we envisage that it would be us. The register I have just slagged off, whereby you pay the one amount and register, is run by the environmental health service of the HSE. That is the enforcement body. It does food law, alcohol law and tobacco control law and has been doing them for years. We presume, therefore, that that service will hold the licensing system and the ICT relating to it, and that in the context of the fees paid by any tobacco and cigarette retailer, some of that money might go towards tobacco control law enforcement. I know it is a tricky business to get hypothecation of money but we might give it a go anyway. That is one part of the enforcement.

As for the other one, Deputy Hourigan might have noticed in the general scheme that we are seeking to legislate for minimum suspension periods. In other words, if an offence is committed, we are setting out in law that a licence should be suspended for a minimum period of, I think, two to seven days for a low-grade offence and seven to 30 days for a high-grade offence. One of the reasons for that is that it is not always the case that tobacco control offences are treated very seriously in terms of suspensions of registration given out by courts. There are examples in the past whereby someone's registration was suspended for one hour, so the response to the offence that was committed was that the retailer could not sell cigarettes for an hour. There was one suspension for a day and another for two days. I can understand this in one sense because the harm that comes from breaching tobacco control law requirements is not so obvious. It is not as obvious as that relating to assault or burglary. It is not clear because this is strange law in the sense that tobacco control law regulates people who sell tobacco, but the ultimate objective is the smoker, so the people being regulated are not the people who are affected the most.

For us, it is a sin to sell cigarettes to a person under 18 because we understand what the consequences of that will be, including early addiction and a lifetime of illness. However, a person on the street might say, "Sure, he sold cigarettes and did not ask the customer whether he or she was over or under 18, but is it not the buyer or consumer who should make the decision?" It is tricky to communicate to people out there that these are serious offences. That is why we have tried in the general scheme to provide that the licence will have to be suspended for a minimum period of two days, even if the offence is considered light because while the offence itself, on the face of it, may not look that serious, the issue is the consequences of that - for example, for the consumer who is under 18 and who was sold cigarettes. It is a tricky one because, obviously, the average person would clearly recognise assault, burglary, etc. Those are terrible offences and of course a penalty should apply to them, whereas something like this seems almost like an administrative error in what the person has done, and to read into that the consequences is not always easy for the courts. We are trying to push through that public health message that, in and of itself, the fact that a retailer did not have the sign up is not a big deal but it is a big deal overall in the context of what we are trying to do denormalise this and to protect children. Sorry. That was too long an answer.