Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy very much. I acknowledge again the very detailed and valuable work the health committee did in pre-legislative scrutiny on this. There are 22 recommendations in the committee's report. While very important, 11 of the 22 are not really legislative recommendations. For example, commissioning further research, increasing funding for quit services, communicating the harms of e-cigarettes, etc., are all good and amendments I agree with, though not relevant to legislation. There are thus 11 recommendations left from the committee and it is important to say six of those 11 recommendations are contained in this Bill. The charge I think is being made is we have somehow ignored the committee's work, so to be clear, of the 11 recommendations in the report - it was an excellent report - that are relevant to legislation, over half of them are in this Bill and more of them will be contained in the next Bill.

I cannot accept this particular amendment for a few reasons. To be fair to the Deputy, I think the intent is to move the next process, namely, the second piece of legislation, along very quickly. While I agree with that, there are technical issues specific to this amendment, though I fully agree with the intent behind it. The first is the timing procedure for notifying the Commission. It is under Directive (EU) 2015/1535, which is also known as the technical standards directive. What we send to the Commission is the draft law, when it is in a position where we can still amend it, and we do not have that yet. As soon as we have that draft law we will send it to the EU, as we did this Bill. Deputy Cullinane asked when we might have that draft to look at and we are saying around March of next year, so not that long. The second reason I cannot accept amendment No. 2, though I fully accept the intent of it, is the proposed section 11(2) appears to be an enabling provision to allow for the regulation of issues relating to nicotine-inhaling products and again these would have to be notified at an EU level under the technical standards directive. That would have the consequence, unintended I know, of delaying this Bill.

We are probably all agreed we want this Bill in before Christmas. I certainly do and am sure colleagues do as well, so let us crack on. Let us get this Bill done, make it illegal to sell vapes to children and bring in all the other provisions we went through earlier. The second Bill is again cognisant of the health committee's work and includes the recommendations from it. We are going with that and it is not something that is sort of fadó fadó, as this is something the public consultation has happened on. Pre-legislative scrutiny is essentially already done and we will move to heads of Bill immediately once the public consultation is completed.

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