Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I am making another comment. The Minister's comments and his insults to the committee relate to the amendment we are discussing, which was about reporting after 12 months on the operation of this legislation.

On the other issues, on the things I and the committee feel strongly should be contained in this, the Minister has promised to bring forward a second piece of legislation. We got the legislative programme recently. Nowhere in that programme, in the form of legislation being drafted or heads being drafted, is there any contemplation at all of a second Bill on the issue of vaping. There is no mention of that anywhere in the legislative programme. The other point is that this committee spent a long time going through the pre-legislative scrutiny process. It took several months. The Minister's officials would presumably have been aware of what was coming up there. He would have been aware of public opinion on this. The Irish Cancer Society commissioned an Ipsos poll that gave very clear answers about what the public wanted. We also know from that poll that the kind of impact the various child-related flavours, packaging and the disposable vapes have and how they are viewed by children.

Extensive polling was done on children in third and fourth year. It showed that the measures the tobacco industry is using work. They are very effective. We spend a lot of time talking about the social determinants of health. These are the commercial determinants of health. It is very important that the Government stands up to big tobacco and the other interests that want to see more and more young people taking up vaping in order that, in time, they will take up smoking as well. This really has nothing to do with getting people to cease smoking. Then it would be just about the flavourings and the packaging. Quite clearly, the game plan is to suck more and more young people into the activity of vaping at huge cost to their own health and public health generally.

The other point I would make about the pre-legislative scrutiny process is that all of those messages were coming across about how the committee wanted the legislation to operate and that we wanted it to be comprehensive and deal with all aspects of this very insidious fairly recent new activity. We sent the Minister the completed pre-legislative scrutiny report in July. That is four months out of the six months. We would have expected him to take on board what we were recommending very strongly. There were very clear recommendations from this committee. If the Minister had done that, we would be in a position now to have a very comprehensive piece of legislation dealing with all aspects of vaping by Christmas, but, unfortunately, it seems that nobody was listening to what this committee said. It has made a bit of a joke out of the whole pre-legislative scrutiny process. The Minister had the opportunity. He had a lot of notice about this. Nowhere at all in the legislative programme do we see any indication of the Minister taking on board the recommendations from this committee and many other bodies in regard to what he needed to do to have a comprehensive response to the threat to public health of vaping. The Minister must accept some of that criticism because there is no point in half doing a job, we should be doing it properly, which is what this committee wants.