Duncan Smith (Dublin Fingal, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I am three and a half years in the Dáil, and the only time we debate tobacco reduction and smoking prevalence is on budget night through the instrument of a taxation measure. The aim is for a tobacco-free Ireland by 2025, which is a smoking prevalence rate of less than 5%. It is a 12-year campaign. We have a smoking prevalence of approximately 18% at the moment - 750,000 people. It is failing on every level. The taxation measures that have been brought in are not bringing the prevalence rates down enough. We are not having this debate through the lens of the health portfolio often enough. There is not a strong enough health-based response to reducing the levels of smoking. That is a fact. We now have the complicating phenomenon of vaping coming in. I know it was announced in the budget that there will be taxation measures on vaping. I suppose that is to be welcomed. However, if it does not come hand in hand with a real health-based policy to target the reduction of smoking and properly tackle vaping, deal with it and not just skirt around the edges of the debate, then we really are at nothing. There is only so long you can go on increasing taxation on cigarettes if the prevalence rate is not going down at the rate needed.

The tobacco-free Ireland policy is failing and this is not doing enough to tackle that.

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