Public Health (Tobacco Products and Nicotine Inhaling Products) (Amendment) Bill 2026: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-09-22 ============================================================ Joe Conway (IND), Cultural and Educational Panel Cuirim fáilte mhór roimh an mBille seo agus admhaím go bhfuil sé an-úsáideach sa troid i gcoinne an stuif nimhneach seo atá istigh sna "vapes" - an t-ainm a thugtar orthu. My grandfather used to tell me stories of watching poor quality American detective movies during the Second World War. He would tell stories of the private detective lurking in the shadows with his upturned collar and his hat slung down over his eyes, standing in a doorway or on a corner watching a suspect or somebody of doubtful motives. The detective would invariably be smoking a cigarette. As the quarry approached, the detective would take his cigarette from his mouth and toss it nonchalantly on the ground. There might only have been about one quarter of the cigarette smoked and because it was during the war years, a great groan would go up in the cinema to see the profligacy of these Americans throwing away three quarters of a cigarette when they could get none. The point of my story is such behaviour glamourised cigarette smoking in the movies. We had advertising in the fifties and its growth in the sixties and into the seventies until governments came down heavily on the tobacco companies. All these people who exploit our human weaknesses have a great ability to zero in on those weaknesses and monetise them. That is what is happening to our young people with this vaping industry that has become commonplace in the last 20 years. The Minister of State spoke of people using vapes who have never smoked in their lives. I have a couple of millennial children. Of course, they tell me they do not use them themselves but they say many of their friends who never smoked in college, or until fairly recently, are now vaping and have become seriously addicted to nicotine. There are insidious effects on their health and their pockets. It is an unseemly waste of time and it looks gauche. Short of picking your nose, I cannot think of anything more gauche than watching somebody go out into the street, sucking on a vape, blowing an aimless puff of whatever it is into the air and deriving satisfaction from that. I applaud the Government's diligence in pursuing this legislation. It concurs with European legislation. However, I am worried that when you come down heavily on things like this, there is a great tendency for those things to go onto the back streets and the black market. Invariably, what comes into the black market is substandard - if you can have a high standard of vape. These things are powered by batteries and if cheap batteries from countries with low standards of production are married to insidious, harmful, noxious content, there is the possibility of facial injuries, not just to the skin but to the back of the throat, and long-term effects on breathing and pulmonary health. Have we thought about bringing in strict penalties and vigilance among the Garda and other agencies to police the possible explosion, for want of a better word, in the use of black market products in response to the proposed legislation? Time and again we hear of efforts made by the Minister of Finance and Tánaiste in trying to engender a greater culture of saving among our people. God knows, we knew that. We need only calculate the cost of a packet of cigarettes. I do not know what vapes cost, but if someone is vaping on a daily basis, it makes a nonsense of State efforts to generate saving, because the natural addictive nature of the substance is drawing people into dissipating their money. The old expression is, "A fool and his money are easily parted" and they are making fools of our young people. All of this is just a waste of money, going into criminality in the black market and going into people who are exploiting our younger people. I am delighted to wait back here in such a quiet Chamber to make my feelings known. There is a whole philosophical debate about this and that we should not be nanny stating about things like drink, gambling and vaping and so on. However, there really comes a time when we have to try to look towards the kinder angels of our nature and bring them to help people who are being exploited and impoverished by these products. Once again, I am delighted to be supportive of the proposed legislation and welcome it. I hope that in the fullness of time. the Minister of State may bring in a range of measures that will hit hard at people who are selling back street stuff and black market product as well. --- 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/2026-09-22/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:49+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-09-22