Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

Monitoring of that takes place every year. This is not to say some will not try it. I remember when the increases were bigger years ago. They tried to hike up their own purchases in advance. I do not think there is as much of that as there used to be.

There is ongoing monitoring of international courier and air freight. Of course, the indicative limit of 800 cigarettes is used by the customs service to determine the legitimate import of cigarettes. However, an individual is entitled to import more than this if they can prove when questioned that this amount is for personal use, which is a bit strange.

The 13% increase raises the CPI by one fifth of 1% — 0.2% — but it is important that we support policies to reduce the incidence of smoking. It is having an effect but there is no doubt we could introduce larger increases if it did not effect the CPI.

I have said over a number of years that there is a problem with the illegal importation of cigarettes. We have the second highest excise content and retail price in the EU after the UK. There are vigorous efforts to combat this smuggling and there has been a huge amount of seizures this year. Up to the end of October, just short of 13,000 seizures were made, yielding 56.7 million cigarettes with a retail value of €19.4 million. This is big business and the smugglers are still there. Over 10,200 seizures were made from postal consignments and almost 2,300 were airport seizures. The cigarettes seized had a combined retail value of around €12.3 million. Seizures at sea ports yielded a smaller amount.

There have been over 110 convictions this years, including convictions for street trading. We have also brought in Operation Hawkeye as part of which more than 300,000 cigarettes were seized in the period from August to October, with 200,000 cigarettes and 90 kg of roll-your-own tobacco being recovered on one premises alone.

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