Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

That will be more than enough, because my brief requires me to be in the Dáil for Topical Issues in less than one hour. I must sign off on three Topical Issues that I have not even seen yet. I can be very quick.

I welcome the broad support in the House for the Bill. It took five years to get to this point. It is really great that we got it into the Seanad within a week or two and it will be even better if we can complete Second Stage today. It will be enormous progress. I welcome sincerely the broad support in the House for the Bill. Senator Crown is absolutely right. The consumption of alcohol, which had gone down, has started to go up again. As the economy has recovered, guess what? People have more money and are spending more on alcohol all over again. We drink much more than we did 20 or 30 years ago.

I very much welcome the support from Sinn Féin, which had concerns about the new unit pricing. I welcome the Sinn Féin Members' support for it at this time.

When it comes to structural separation in stores, we did not go ahead with the original proposals introduced in 2009 by the then Minister, Dermot Ahern, because they were probably too onerous. They required separate entrances, separate tills and large physical barriers. We are not going that far, but we want alcohol to be separated in stores. It will not bankrupt any small to medium shop to put in a partition. I am sure they do that type of work all the time as part of their general trade.

While we are not writing it into the Bill, it is our intention to go ahead with minimum pricing at the same time as Northern Ireland. We have an agreement with the Northern Ireland Executive that it will also introduce minimum unit pricing. We intend to do it at the same time for all the obvious reasons. It would be totally counterproductive if people just went North of the Border. While it is not written into the legislation, as we do not want to totally tie our hands, it is certainly the intention.

Somebody asked where the additional profits would go. If this works, there will not be additional profits. The whole point is to reduce consumption. If consumption is reduced, less alcohol will be sold and there should not be more profits or more money for the Exchequer. Obviously, that is entirely contingent on the legislation working. Once again, I thank the Seanad for its support for this very important measure.