Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

People Before Profit welcomes the principle of this Bill but many will ask why it took so long to ban the sale of these products to under-18s. It is hard to believe that we are only introducing legislation now because vape products have been around for more than a decade. Questions have to be asked about that. There is no doubt that tobacco companies are luring young people in particular with very seductive packaging. There are thousands of flavours and you even see young people who are definitely under 18 using these products, including disposable products. It is not a good sign when young people are engaged in this kind of behaviour.

I am not against vaping as such. It has a place when it comes to those who have come from smoking 20, 30 or 40 cigarettes per day to vaping. The genie is out of the bottle and you cannot ban vaping; that will be impossible. We should not go down the route that Australia has gone down as that will just drive it underground. There needs to be a better regulatory system because at the moment it is like the Wild West with flavours and who sells these products. The proliferation of vaping products has gone well beyond its remit and anybody can sell these products. Some of the people selling them are completely unscrupulous and they will sell them to anybody, so there needs to be a crackdown in the regulatory system and packaging. It would be very difficult to ban flavours and just have one nicotine flavour. There should be a small and limited number of flavours but if we just have one flavour, then that will not really work.

We are all in agreement that we need to do something better because we do not want young people who never smoked taking up a bad habit. In the last 15 to 20 years there has been a huge reduction in the number of people smoking and that is a good thing. Can we have a tobacco-free world? That is impossible but we can do things better and more safely for people who choose to vape and they can vape in a safer manner. We do not need to ban products and we do not want to go down that route. If we go down the route of banning vaping completely, we will be coming back here in five years with a worse situation than we have; I guarantee that. Australia has made a huge mistake in banning vaping completely. Hopefully with this legislation and other legislation, particularly around packaging, we will have a better system than we have now.

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