Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate Ms Power's honesty. I refer to the old black and white photographs of nine-year-old or ten-year-old children with peaked caps smoking cigarettes. One could see the pathway of those children's lives. They probably aged far more quickly and faced more health problems than would have been the case if they did not smoke. We want to avoid situations such as that. Significant inroads have been made in the past 15 years or so in terms of not allowing it to happen again. We need to double down on that effort.

I always feel sorry for the people in their late 80s or 90s who go to the GP and are told to pack in the cigarettes, a product they have been smoking for many years. The person probably has only a few months or years left in his or her life. They are dying out, unfortunately, I want the law to be hard and clamp down on smoking. I certainly want us to do everything we can in terms of advertising. I believe that more taxation should be landed on top of cigarettes in each budget. However, I always feel sorry for those people. My grandparents were in their late 80s and they were told to pack in the cigarettes. We do not want other people to take that path but we need to keep those older smokers in the back of our minds.

I do not wish to name the company, but every supermarket and convenience store sells roll-up papers made by a particular firm. Many of the young people I see smoking - and there are far fewer of them than in previous years - make their own cigarettes because they are cheaper. On the train I took to travel to the Dáil yesterday, there were two girls sitting across from me who were rolling up seven or eight cigarettes to have later in the day. They were very young. No measures have been implemented in respect of that kind of paper. If it were to be taken out of the market, I am not sure what could replace it. Does that need to be considered?