Mr. Chris Macey:

These taxes started as sin taxes and revenue raisers and have become very much public health taxes. There is an element of alcohol, in small doses such as a glass of red wine, where there is evidence it can actually be good for a person's cardiovascular health. This would be a small amount of red wine occasionally and that type of thing. This is a little more complex than tobacco which is just bad for you. For a long time we have advocated for the €20 pack of cigarettes. Certainly taxation has been the biggest weapon in reducing smoking rates in Ireland, and particularly in stopping the take-up of smoking among young people. Unfortunately, that is now starting to change and for the first time in a generation the youth smoking rate is increasing. It is not proven yet but there appears to be a link to that and the rise of e-cigarettes and the rise of nicotine addiction through that. We are proposing that there is some taxation on e-cigarettes that is not high enough to stop people who are genuinely using them to try to quit smoking, but will be high enough to stop children using them. There has been a huge explosion in child and youth use of e-cigarettes. These measures are really important. The taxation of cigarettes and tobacco takes in some €1 billion a year for the State. It spends around 1% of that in helping people to quit but 70% to 80% of people who smoke want to quit and they are not getting enough help to do that. The last figure I saw on this was €30 million per year being spent on the whole panoply of tobacco control measures or smoking cessation measures but it is not enough. These are people who are addicted to one of the most addictive substances on the planet. They need more help.