Public Health (Single-Use Vapes) Bill 2025: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-04-28 ============================================================ Joanne Collins (SF), Agricultural Panel I will start by saying I am a vaper, so I am slightly biased on this. I do not use disposables. I used to until I discovered that the same flavour as the disposable can be bought in the bottle of juice and it is actually cheaper to use a reusable. That is one thing that Members have wrong; it is not cheaper to use disposables. If you were to smoke it like a smoker would smoke it, one reusable cigarette or vape will only last for a day. I completely agree this is not for children. It is not for under-18s. I would like to see the target age of smokers or vapers not being 18 to 25 or 15 to 25 but rather, I would like to see the figure at 15 to 18 years of age. On turning 18, a person is legally allowed to smoke cigarettes or vapes. The next Bill that is coming in was mentioned. I have no problem with banning disposables. I have not smoked a disposable vape in probably two years until I got caught once when I left my rechargeable here one day and I had to buy one at the train station because I thought I would not make it home without my nicotine. I put my hand up, I love my vape. The banning of the flavours is the wrong way to go. I started on my vape on a nicotine flavour and it lasted me two-and-a-half days and I went back on cigarettes because it was absolutely disgusting. As horrible as they were, cigarettes were a hell of a lot better. Many people I have spoken to agree with me that if flavours were not available we would either go outside the State to get them, with the risk of getting something that is not up to the standard that exists here, or go back on cigarettes. We are going to have problem where suddenly more people go back to smoking cigarettes. I get that they are not for children but change the packaging. Put them behind a wall as was done with cigarettes. People know the flavours they want and do not need to see the colourful box to decide what they want. People go between a couple of flavours. They are fruit flavours. It makes me feel better having a fruit flavour than smoking a cigarette. I actually feel healthier for it. In any pub or off licence there are bottles of WKD, which are blue and fun to look at and there are the new West Coast Cooler flavours that look like Red Bull cans. A law is in place that children cannot buy them. It should not need a prohibition or outright ban for everybody. The laws that are in place should be enacted. They should be enforced so that children cannot buy them. It is the same with bottles of cider. There is not just one flavour. It is not just apple, there is a strawberry and lime cider. I am entitled to buy it because I am over the age. There are different flavours. There will not be a ban on all cigarettes except for one flavour. We are not going to say that we are only going to smoke Silk Cut Ultra going forward in this country because there is less nicotine in them. We need to think fully and talk to all sides. I know about the Irish Heart Foundation and the waste side of it. Responsible Vape in Ireland make some very good points. They completely agree that children should not be buying them. They are not supposed to be marketed at children. That is the fault of the packaging. I am sure people would be quite happy to put it into generic packaging and do what they did with cigarettes. That would allow people who came off cigarettes, whether it was for cost or for health, to go on vaping instead because they probably felt it was not as bad. We have to think about the adults who are going to be affected by this and we have to look at what could happen down the line. A full, outright ban will lead to a lot more smokers. Then we will have another problem on our hands and we will go backwards. The Minister of State needs to be very careful as to what she bans and what she regulates. I completely agree, I do not like to see children - only last week I was going through some of my old handbags and I found a couple of old disposables that I had thrown in there. They are everywhere and I know that, because I see them everywhere. I do get that there is a waste disposal issue and that side of it. However, it is cheaper to buy a reusable cigarette. Senator Keogan was saying there are multi-use ones where you charge them but you do not fill them, which are cheaper again. They might fall through the cracks of this legislation. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-04-28/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:52+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-04-28