Martin Conway (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for his comprehensive reply. It was well put together by the officials and he delivered it well. This legislation will be published in January hopefully and it will undoubtedly be passed swiftly in this House in any event. The Minister of State spoke about 2004. I remember when the Minister for Health at the time, the Taoiseach, Deputy Micheál Martin, introduced the smoking ban. The publicans got up and claimed they ran the country and would not let this happen but they got their answer that time. They tried to bully the Government of the time into reversing the decision. Scant regard was shown to the thousands of staff working in bars at the time. In fairness to then Minister, he stood up to the publicans. If there were any proposal to reintroduce smoking in pubs, the publicans' staff are the people who would push back. That will never happen because it is now a European norm that smoking does not happen in pubs.

We need to go a little bit further. We need to ban smoking outside pubs, at the front entrances, because there is nothing as disgusting as going up and down the main streets of towns and having gangs of people outside pubs smoking. That is bad for people's health, particularly on a fine day when there is no breeze. We also need to ban smoking in parks where there are young children and in playgrounds. We need to ban it outside schools, at the entrance to hospitals and railway stations and outside the waiting rooms in bus stations. There is an awful lot more we must do and we need to get on with it.

What has been done is very welcome. The work the Joint Committee on Health did on the report published last year was very constructive and fair. It has to be acknowledged that the people who own these awful vaping shops have to make a living too but they cannot do so at the expense of destroying our streetscape up and down the country or selling this awful product to under 18-year-olds. They can make a living in a plainly designed shop, without packaging or advertising, where their products are under the counter. If people then choose to go in and buy these disgusting products, we have to respect the fact that we live in a democracy and there is choice. One thing we can do is make sure the Christmas lights - the vapes - will not be in any public place where there are non-vapers and non-smokers trying to live their lives as healthily as possible.