Public Health (Single-Use Vapes) Bill 2025: Committee and Remaining Stages
Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-07
============================================================

Gareth Scahill (FG), Nominated by the Taoiseach

I agree wholeheartedly. As someone who has been out with communities cleaning up our streets and parks, the volume of these single-use vapes that builds up all over the place is amazing.
The Bill has an enforcement side. Every day, Senators come in to this Chamber to talk about one thing or another, and the lack of enforcement. The Minister and Ministers of State empower the HSE in this area and are giving them powers to impose significant fines on businesses found in contravention. Rather than including an amendment to revisit and analyse effectiveness we need to come down strong on vapes because they are a blight on communities. If we give the HSE the powers to enforce this and people still say they will be able to get single-use vapes then they need to be reported and the vapes tracked down because we are not fully sure what is in the stuff that is coming here from other jurisdictions as those products do not undergo the same safety measures and precautions according to European standards. We need to do that because there is an onus on us to protect everyone, including young people who vape. If the protections are not there with the levels of nicotine and other substances that are in these single-use vapes then we must come down hard on them and the Bill does that. I do not feel that the amendment is needed but I see exactly where this Bill is going and fully support it.

---

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/2026-07-07/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:09+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-07-07