Dr. Helen McAvoy:

I do not believe that to be the case. I think there were lots of different changes relating to smoking during the pandemic. The Social Impact of COVID-19 Survey released by the CSO, which looked at people smoking, showed that smokers were also very frightened during the pandemic because they knew the damage done by smoking was putting them into a group of people who were at higher risk of having a negative outcome from an infection. I think that did drive some quite attempts as well. The access people had to the State's stop smoking services and their local pharmacy and social support networks decreased as well. The HSE worked very hard to move to remote consultations with smokers seeking to quit and invested a lot of time and energy to try to improve access but not everyone is able to access a remote stop smoking adviser or was confident enough-----