Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

On 10 September, I brought a memorandum to the Cabinet on the proposed vaping legislation. I now have Government approval to draft the Bill. A comprehensive heads of Bill document is in place. My officials, including the two officials with me today, have put a lot of work into that. It was more complex than I originally envisaged. When we are restricting packaging and colouring, there is quite a bit of complexity to it. We are pushing that as hard as we can. I asked for a big push from the Department to get the memorandum forward in order that, regardless of elections, the Bill would be drafted. That is happening.

The taxation on vapes is a measure that came from the tax side. It is a taxation measure from the Minister, Deputy Chambers, rather than from the Department of Health. As the Deputy said, there is a legitimate public health role for vaping in smoking cessation. We all know people who now vape rather than smoke. They will say that if vapes did not exist, they would still be smoking. The best evidence we have at this time is that there is clear clinical evidence of damage done to children and teenagers from vaping. There is emerging evidence of associated damage to adults. Certainly, when I talk to respiratory consultants in the HSE who are treating people, they are very clear that there is a link. Therefore, while vaping is a legitimate smoking cessation tool, there is also harm associated with it. Vapes are addictive and there is a lot of nicotine in them. Ideally, we want to move to a situation where people are not trapped in addiction by these products, whether cigarettes or vapes. We know from price elasticity on cigarettes that it is one of the measures that is effective in discouraging smoking.