Ms Averil Power:

I agree that for long-term smokers who are desperate to give up smoking vaping is an aid to help them to quit. The last thing a long-term smoker wants to see is a child or young person taking up the habit. It is possible to maintain access to vaping for adults who feel in desperation that it is their only option while also protecting children from the flavouring and marketing so that children who never would have taken up e-cigarettes, or who might have tried them once and found them disgusting and so did not go on to develop a nicotine addiction, do not end up using e-cigarettes as a gateway to cigarette and tobacco smoking and, thus, nicotine addiction. As stated by Deputy Kenny, we are making progress. We have been winning this fight. A small proportion of people still need our help to get off cigarettes. There are people who are really struggling and they need more Government support. They need nicotine replacement therapy, NRT, to be cheaper and they need more direct support in terms of helping them to quit. Over time, smoking rates have decreased dramatically in this country both among young people and adults because we have been brave enough to take on industry, ban smoking indoors, introduce plain packaging and increase prices, as well as other positive public health measures. It would be madness to risk all of that. We know that the rates of smoking among young people are increasing for the first time in years because of vaping. It is possible, from a harm reduction point of view, to maintain that choice for the long-term adult smoker for whom vaping is the only option in terms of helping him or her to quit tobacco smoking without having vaping products pushed in the face of children every time they go into a newsagents and on billboards and the sides of buses. We can do both.