Smoking is bad for you and it would be best that people did not smoke and that we did things to discourage them from smoking but punishing people financially for an addiction is not the way forward and is overwhelmingly a regressive form of taxation in that it disproportionately hits the less well-off. As for the many people living alone who have this craving for cigarettes, it is unfair to suggest that this increase in the cost of a box of cigarettes would help them or make them think they should stop smoking.
Cigarettes are certainly expensive as it is, and adding 50 cent to the price of them will not stop people who love smoking. Of course I appreciate the campaigns by the Minister for Health and previous Ministers on how to break a smoking addiction and the public health awareness campaigns to try to stop people smoking.
Key terms by TF-IDF across 2,613 words from 13 speakers. The summary quotes the highest-scoring sentences verbatim — nothing is paraphrased.
Tellers: Tá, Deputies Pádraig Mac Lochlainn and Denise Mitchell; Níl, Deputies Jack Chambers and Brendan Griffin.
| Question | Result | Tá–Níl |
|---|---|---|
| Question put: | Carried | 87–47 |
Party shown is the one each member held on 2021-10-12, frozen by a dated join — not their party today. The Oireachtas API publishes no date of birth and returns an empty gender field for every member in this period, so no age or gender breakdown is shown.