David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with colleagues. I welcome the legislation and the debate today. We are broadly supportive of this Bill but we will bring forward some amendments on Committee Stage which I will discuss later. The Bill is a very important and long overdue public health measure. It was needed years ago when vaping was a new technology and before it was heavily and aggressively marketed towards young people. The health committee completed pre-legislative scrutiny of the proposals in this Bill last July. The evidence we heard clearly showed that the regulation of tobacco and nicotine inhaling products needs to be modernised. Recent data indicate that in 2015, just under one in four teenagers had used a vape, and that by 2019, this had risen to nearly 40%. The numbers smoking have also increased although they are much lower than the numbers vaping. It is clear from international and anecdotal evidence that this trend has continued if not accelerated during the pandemic years. Because of weaknesses in the existing legislation, vaping has become a habit which now seems to be embedded in youth culture. That is a significant change in recent years, and the progress made in reducing smoking and nicotine addiction over the past two decades is becoming undone. In that context of rising smoking and vaping rates among teenagers and young people, the Bill is welcome despite the delays.

The fundamental purpose of the Bill is to ensure vapes or nicotine inhaling products are regulated to the same extent as cigarettes and traditional smoking methods and that the regulation of all of these products is up to the standard we need. The Bill seeks to achieve this by establishing a licensing system for the sale of tobacco products and nicotine inhaling products which would provide a framework for enforcement against breaches of the law. Part 2 provides that the HSE environmental health service would manage and monitor compliance with the licensing requirements and be responsible for enforcement.

The biggest gap in existing legislation is the fact it is not illegal to sell nicotine inhaling products to children. Part 3 provides for offences in this regard.

This is perhaps the most important part of this Bill. Several sections relate to protecting children from exposure to these products insofar as possible. Section 27 prohibits the sale of tobacco products or nicotine inhaling products to children and I support it. Section 28 prohibits the sale of such products at events aimed at children and at events at which the majority of people are children. I support that measure. Section 29 prohibits advertising these products in or at school or within 200 m of the grounds of a school and in or on public service and public transport vehicles, including trains, buses and light rail, and in or at stations and stops for such public transport vehicles. Section 39 prohibits the advertisement of nicotine inhaling products at cinemas. Taken together, these sections provide a robust set of offences which should stop the sale of these products to children and, as important, curb the effects of targeted advertisements which are designed to get children interested in and addicted to nicotine from a young age.

During our pre-legislative scrutiny of the proposals, advocate organisations such as the Irish Heart Foundation made the case that the Bill should also ban flavoured vaping products and ban or regulate the packaging of vaping products. I would appreciate it if the Minister of State or the Minister for Health at some stage in the course of the progression of this Bill could address these issues and whether they were or are being considered. In particular I would like to hear the Ministers' thoughts on the regulation of packaging and whether he or she intends to bring the regulation of packaging in line with packaging of cigarettes and other products. Will the Ministers enforce plain packaging? Are they content that the measures in this Bill are sufficient? Clarification on those issues today would be useful.

Part 4 provides for test purchasing to ascertain compliance with prohibitions on sales to children. It allows for children over the age of 15, with proper consent from their parents, to be employed as part of spot checks working with an inspector. Will the Minister of State elaborate on how this will work in practice, the level at which these children will be paid and how it will be ensured appropriate consent has been received from parents? All of these sections will require further scrutiny and we will come back on Committee Stage with amendments where we feel the Bill can and should be improved.

One simple amendment which should be standard practice is a requirement in the Bill for a review of the legislation. We have seen the usefulness of this requirement with a number of Acts. I will be moving an amendment to include an obligation to review the operation and effectiveness of the legislation after two years because, with any new licensing system, there may be challenges and we need to be sure the licensing system and the offences which prohibit the targeting of children are working as intended.

It would be especially important to review the effectiveness of the Bill in dealing with online sales. Section 8 attempts to deal with this by providing that the point of sale for the purposes of the Act shall be considered the location within the State from which the product is dispatched where the product has been sold outside of the State. I am conscious that online sales can be extremely difficult to regulate, especially where products are purchased outside of the State. However, the effectiveness of the provision seems questionable. I hope it works as intended. That is precisely why the Bill should have a mandatory review after two years. This will give time for the system to be set up and embedded and allow for a period of data collection to analyse the performance and operation of the legislation.

Lastly, much more can and must be done outside of legislation to manage these issues. Information is key and the Ministers must ensure proper information is fully available but also accessible and widely distributed. That must include the harms and risks of smoking, the relative harms and risks associated with traditional methods compared with vaping, and an honest assessment of nicotine as an addictive and potentially harmful substance. It is essential that people who decide to smoke or vape are fully equipped with accurate information. It is the Government's responsibility to tackle misinformation and misperceptions about these problems. It is important also that we are being honest about the relative risks rather than relying on blanket statements that people may trust or believe. The nuanced differences between vaping and traditional methods are important. This is especially important for people who are who are considering vaping to stop smoking. We should help adults to make informed choices and make sure children do not have easy and legal access to addictive substances. The Bill goes some way to achieving these goals but there is a good deal of other work to do. For all of those reasons I will be supporting the Bill.

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