Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank colleagues for their time today and for their contributions to the debate, which has been very useful and thoughtful. I note that there appears to be broad support for the Bill. The Government will obviously be supporting it. We have heard from several Independent Members and from the Social Democrats. We will see where other Members and parties in the Opposition are but I want to acknowledge that broad support. The one party we know is not supporting the Bill is Sinn Féin. That is entirely within its rights.

I will try to address various issues raised by colleagues throughout the debate. The first has regard to whether the Bill is workable. Various arguments have been put forward to say that it is not enforceable or, even if it is, that it will not have any impact and that younger people will simply go around the scrum to find somebody who is 21.

Issues were also raised around free choice and how we are generally seen to be adults under law when we turn 18. There are different ages for different things, however. In healthcare, the medical age of consent is 16. You can drive a car at 17 and I believe you can still drive a Honda 50 at 16. You can buy your first drink at 18. You used to be able to buy cigarettes at 16. The age of 18 is not a hard and fast rule but we generally see 18 as a pivotal point in our lives where we move from adolescence to adulthood. I fully accept that. We thought this through very carefully for that reason. We tested the Bill in respect of a lot of the challenges brought forward here. We tested it ourselves and I asked myself many of these questions. Is it reasonable to impose any restrictions on choice above the age of 18? Is it enforceable? Will it have any effect or will people simply be able to bypass it? Having considered the matter at length, my very clear conclusion was that this is absolutely the right thing to do because it is going to save a lot of lives in the future.

Is it enforceable? Of course, it is enforceable. We brought in the minimum age of 16 some years ago and that was enforced, although not perfectly. That was then increased to 18. Was that enforced? It was. Is there more we can do on enforcement? I am sure there is. Deputy Paul Donnelly raised the question of the pretty lax enforcement procedures to date and referenced some examples. I accept that. We rectified a lot of that in the vaping Act that we brought in last year. The penalties and enforcement measures available to the courts under this Bill are the same as those under the vaping Act, which represented a significant step forward. Deputy Donnelly may not have been aware of that Act but, previous to it, his points would have been absolutely fair.

While I know they are being raised in good faith, some of the concerns being raised are similar to those raised in respect of the workplace smoking ban. On free will, we heard many people say that they are adults and that if they want to go into a pub and have a cigarette, that is their choice. We heard similar things around enforcement. People said that no publican would actually enforce the ban and that people would continue to smoke. The truth is that, as a nation, we did not know what was going to happen but it was incredibly successful and it set Ireland up as a leading country as regards radical public health measures that help. I hope that this will be the same and I believe that it is entirely possible to address the concerns that are being raised in good faith here in the Dáil. On the issue of enforcement, it is something we apply across the board. It is something that we simply need to do.

Will it have any impact? The real-world evidence we have from countries that have done this shows that it certainly does have a very important and meaningful impact. The modelling also suggests that it will have a profound and very important impact. It also comes down to common sense. As I said earlier and as Deputy Shortall made reference to, the most important group here is those aged 15 to 17 years. Will it be harder for someone aged 15 or 16 years today to get access to cigarettes if he or she needs to know a 21-year-old rather than an 18-year-old? We all know the answer is "Yes". Is it perfect? Of course, it is not. Will it be harder? Of course, it will. That will make a big difference.

A lot of speakers referred to the two vaping Acts. We passed an Act last year that did several things. It banned the sale of vapes to anyone under the age of 18. It also did a lot of other things, many of which were tobacco control measures, although that did not get much attention at the time. I refer to vending machines, licensing regimes, prohibitions regarding children's events and other things. Colleagues are quite rightly saying that there is more to be done. I fully agree with that but there is a process that we have to follow. This involves public consultation and notification to the EU. We are taking a leading position on this. I am very happy to tell colleagues that the results of the public consultation will be published in the coming weeks. If they will excuse the pun, they come with a health warning. There appears to have been an orchestrated campaign on the part of some of the vaping outlets to get their customers to respond to the survey.

We need to take the results with a health warning attached to them.

What are we looking at? We are looking at controls on the display of vapes in shops. Personally, I would move it to the same place as cigarettes and have a plain display behind the counters, as is done with alcohol. We are looking at significant bans on flavours. We are all agreed on that. We are looking at having much plainer packaging. There is broad political consensus around that. Another area is smoking in outdoor dining areas. I see the Minister of State, Deputy Ossian Smith, is here. He has been pushing for banning disposable vapes. He can correct me if I am wrong but I believe he and I are both fully supportive of that. That will go into the upcoming vaping Bill. The officials present have been working hard on that legislation. I assure colleagues that work on the Bill before us has not displaced that legislation and it has not slowed down. We have deeply committed public health officials. They have been doing both Bills in parallel. I acknowledge their work and indeed the work of two Chief Medical Officers. I had the great pleasure and honour of working with both Dr. Tony Holohan, who was the first person with whom I had this conversation around smoking, in 2021, and his successor, Professor Breda Smith, both of whom are strongly supportive of the measure.

Various Deputies referenced civil society. One of the Sinn Féin Deputies, Deputy Paul Donnelly, I believe, referred the Irish Cancer Society with regard to smoking inequalities and points the society made, with which I fully agree, in terms of the link between health outcomes for an individual householder or community and the wealth of that community. There is no question about that. An interesting aspect is that my officials advised me that about half of the health inequalities we see can be related to higher smoking levels in lower income areas. Therefore, one thing we can and should do is to reduce smoking generally. By doing so, we are having a really important, indirect impact on those health inequalities, which are completely unacceptable. This speaks to exactly the reasonable and real concern that Deputy Donnelly raised.

Colleagues also raised questions about other countries and whether we will be out on our own on this. The facts are as follows. At least 11 countries have already brought the legal age up to 21. However, they are countries around the world and are not typically western European countries. I have spoken about this with EU health ministers and the World Health Organization and it is interesting that since we brought this in, other countries are now signalling that they are going to go in this direction. Slovenia's national strategy has a minimum age of 21 now. The Netherlands is now looking at it. The Dutch are good on global public health leadership and have now said they are looking at bringing the age up to 21. In Finland, a ministerial working group has been brought together which is looking at raising the age to 20. We will be the first country in the EU. We are going to take a lead on this, just as we did with the workplace smoking ban. As happened with the workplace smoking ban, other countries are now looking very seriously at this as well.

I mentioned civil society. This is not an exhaustive list but some of the groups that are very much in favour of moving the age at which cigarettes can be sold to 21 include the Irish Cancer Society, the Irish Cancer Prevention Network, the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, the Irish Heart Foundation, the Institute of Public Health and Foróige, interestingly. Some of the polling I have seen and some of the vox pops done by the media on this showed that the majority of people in this age range said they support the measure. I did not know how that was going to land with 18- 19- and 20-year-olds but in fact they were saying, yes, it is self-evident that smoking kills.

We heard personal testimony earlier. I have the same testimony from my own family and I would say most, if not all, of us can share testimony about loved ones we have lost through diseases that have come from years and decades of smoking.

One other point was made and it is probably a good one to end on. It is Deputy Cullinane's question, which Deputy Shortall and others also asked, as to why, if we are interested in banning smoking entirely, we should not say that. I am interested in banning smoking entirely. We probably all agree that if cigarettes were to arrive today and some company or set of companies told us they had this unregulated product and, by the way, it will kill two out of every three people who consume it, will cause a vast amount of pain, suffering, sadness and grief, lead to many funerals, absorb a huge amount of the country's healthcare resource and has no benefits whatsoever and then asked if we minded if they sold it in this country, I do not believe Dáil Éireann would entertain that for ten minutes. We would laugh them out of the room.

What we are dealing with is a legacy issue, whereby the tobacco companies, as we know, knew about the effects of their products long before the public did and we have generations of people who smoke and are addicted to smoking. Would I like to see smoking eradicated in our country in its totality? I absolutely would. This is an important step in that direction.

Colleagues will be aware the New Zealand Government implemented a law. The new Government of New Zealand has since repealed that law. Essentially, it was a smoke-free generation law whereby a particular generation of children born after a particular year could not legally buy cigarettes. Essentially what it did was move it up, year by year, over many years. The Prime Minister of the UK, for now, said it was officially UK policy to do the same thing. If there is a change in the British Government, let us see what the new government says. The person most likely to be Prime Minister very shortly was my counterpart in health during the Covid pandemic. He was the shadow health spokesperson when I sat where Deputy Cullinane is sitting. That is where Keir Starmer was. He has a health background. Let us see if the UK goes with that.

We took advice from the EU. When we were considering this Bill, we got legal advice to see whether we could do this here. The advice we got back was that it would be very difficult to do. However, we are continuing to press and are talking to other member states. We are saying, "For goodness sake, would we not be just better off if there were not cigarettes in the European Union"? Most member states agree. The position might change in the Single Market, but for now the advice we have is we are not able to pursue it.

As I said in the opening comments, we are moving the age to 21. It will be up to a future health Minister, maybe the next one, to have a conversation with Dáil and Seanad Éireann, civil society, the public and clinicians as to whether we should keep going and move on from 21. That is what I mean when I say this is not just another measure to marginally reduce smoking rates. This is the beginning of a fundamentally different approach, one that says we have had enough and we are getting rid of this product in our country. There are legal, democratic and health constraints. We are dealing with a lot of people in very serious addiction to tobacco. We are cognisant of that. However, I believe this is the start of the end of tobacco in our country.

I will finish by thanking colleagues for their time. It has been a very healthy debate. I look forward to discussing it at the health committee as soon as possible. I commend the Bill to the House.

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