Martin Conway (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House for this important legislation. I share the concerns of Senator Malcolm Byrne and others that it has taken too long and I think the Minister will accept that. This really should have been done a number of years ago. I accept the fact the Minister has only been in office since 2020; it should have been dealt with even before then. I find myself agreeing with everything my colleague Senator Mullen said. We are seeing a very dangerous development of vaping among young people. While cigarette smoking has reduced and a great body of work has been done to reduce cigarette smoking among young people and in society in general, it has been replaced by vaping. I do not buy the argument that vaping helps people to get off cigarettes; it does not. There are people who make a lifestyle choice to vape and who never had a problem with cigarettes It is clear that is happening. The research demonstrates that is happening and we need to deal with it. It is terrible that a vegetable shop closed and a vape shop opened and we see them everywhere. In Ennis, in my own county of Clare, there was a very famous shop for years called the Record Rack. As children, we all went into it and it is now a vape shop. I mean it is just awful and they are appearing everywhere. This legislation bans them at festivals. That is great but really and truly vaping needs to be banned in the same way that cigarette smoking is banned. It needs to be banned in all indoor areas and all public areas. It needs to be banned in cars. There just needs to be zero tolerance when it comes to it, the same as with cigarette smoking.

The Tánaiste, when he was Minister for Health in March 2004, was very brave when he introduced the smoking ban. The pushback from the publicans at the time was outrageous. If we proposed introducing smoking indoors now, the pushback would be something else. Society has changed and almost 95% of people have no tolerance for cigarette smoke. The public do not have tolerance for vaping and that needs to be dealt with.

We also see a situation where there are 30- and 40-packs of cigarettes now. Before it was 10- and 20-packs and the 10-packs were banned. Now instead of there being packs of 20, there are packs of 30 and 35 cigarettes. We should ban anything over 20 so it should be just one single packet of 20 cigarettes and nothing else.

In Australia, a person needs a prescription to get a vape. A doctor has to certify that the person tried to give up cigarettes and, as such, they need a vape. That is what we should consider here. We should ban vape shops from opening up and down the country. They certainly should be banned from the main streets of towns. It is terrible to look at the main streets of a lot of towns now and there is either a mobile phone shop or vape shop. We need to really evaluate our approach to it.

I am glad the Minister is establishing a consultative process for further legislation in this area.I strongly suggest that he try to introduce that legislation in 2024 because there is a lot that could be done in this Bill that is not being done. I fully accept that it is a very good start but it is only a start. We really need to deal with this head-on and show zero tolerance.