Public Health (Single-Use Vapes) Bill 2025: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-04-28 ============================================================ Martin Conway (IND), Administrative Panel I welcome the Minister of State to the House, and I welcome the legislation. Senator McDowell makes some pertinent points with which I agree. The example of the 15-year-old asking the 18-year-old extends to off licences, lottery tickets and all these other things as well. It is a major issue. As a former retailer, I have fierce sympathy for retailers. They are usually employing staff, and a lot of weekend staff in particular are only 17, 18 or 19 themselves. It is very difficult and very awkward. The global point I wish to make is that the former Ministers, Stephen Donnelly and the Tánaiste, Deputy Harris, both brought in Bills. We have had a couple of different Bills on vaping. It is painstakingly slow. I am a big believer in getting legislation right and that does take time; I totally understand that. I also acknowledge Senator Collins and admire her for giving up cigarettes. If vaping is helping in that regard, that is a good thing. I had a discussion with the Minister for disabilities in Australia when he visited Ireland in 2024. He said that vaping is actually illegal in Australia in the sense that you can only vape if you have a prescription to get a vape. I would love us to get to that point in Ireland, so somebody who is giving up cigarettes and needs an intervention to do that goes to their GP, gets a prescription, and vapes, as opposed to children and young people vaping with the danger of leading on to smoking and other substances. We need to actually grasp this out-of-control nettle and deal with it. You cannot walk on any main street in this country but you will notice the proliferation of these vape shops. In Ennis there are four or five of them. I was recently in Arthur's Quay shopping centre in Limerick. As soon as you go in the door, the first thing you see is a vape shop. I was in a SuperValu supermarket at the weekend and the brightest and most striking feature behind the customer service checkout was the vaping display. Why in God's name can we not just get rid of all advertising of vapes in shops? These shops would then have to comply with the style of a town. There is nothing as bad as seeing these awful vape shops lit up at night creating the temptation and attraction for young people. We are a great country but we were a great country when it came to what Micheál Martin did in March 2004 when he banned smoking in pubs. Publicans went on television at the time and said they ran the country and you hold your meetings in our premises. They did not run the country and the smoking ban at that stage was contentious but if one was to propose reintroducing smoking in pubs now, 98% of the population would go against it. I firmly believe vaping is the next challenge we need to deal with head on. There is no reason we cannot be the standard-bearers and set the standard in Europe in dealing with vaping. The first thing we need to do is remove signage over these shops and put vapes under the counter the same as cigarettes. I support getting rid of single-use vapes. That is appropriate. It has taken too long to get to this stage. It also took too long to prohibit under-18s from buying vapes. We ultimately need to make it very difficult for people over or under 18 to get their hands on vapes. The research is fairly clear that vapes lead on to other things. We owe it to the young people of this country not just to tell them vaping is wrong but to demonstrate it by removing it from our main streets, shopping centres, SuperValus and elsewhere where they are in your face as soon as you go in the door. We still have work to do on smoking. We need to ban smoking outside schools, pubs that do food and restaurants and places like that. There is a lot of work to do on smoking as well. The Minister of State is doing a good job and I know she is here to listen. I have no doubt but the final Bill might, I hope, reflect some of our concerns. --- 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