I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Public Health, Tobacco Products and Nicotine Inhaling Products (Amendment) Bill 2026. This is an important Bill, which is broad in scope and long overdue. For too long, policy in this area has been reactive. New products emerge, marketing tactics change and the law has lagged behind. This Bill marks an important change in approach from the Government, which we in the Opposition have sought for years. This is future-focused legislation rather than the usual catch-up and piecemeal approach we have seen over the past few years. The purpose of legislation like this should be clear. It should be to reduce smoking and it should be to protect children and young people from nicotine addiction. It should regulate products in a way that is proportionate, practical and grounded in common sense. When I test the Bill against these principles, there is a great deal in it that I can support. However, there is one significant measure that goes too far and gets the balance wrong. That is the total ban on all flavours except tobacco, despite the Bill as drafted allowing for additional flavours. The Bill does a number of important things. First, it extends regulation beyond traditional tobacco and vaping products to include nicotine consumption products, such as nicotine pouches, including a ban on sales to under-18s. That is the right thing to do and it has taken too long to get here. These products have been developing in a grey area for too long. They carry a high risk of oral and gum diseases and it is beyond time that they should be regulated properly. It is important that nicotine pouches are regulated as tightly as cigarettes and vapes in terms of packaging, naming and advertising and, obviously, we will tease this out on Committee Stage. Second, the Bill strengthens controls around nicotine inhaling products or vapes. It tightens the rules on advertising, sale and display. It restricts colours and imagery on devices and packaging and toy-like vapes, and all of this I support. These are serious interventions and they are justified. Third, the Bill strengthens enforcement. It increases fines and penalties for breaches of tobacco control law. It includes provisions dealing with serious risk products, enforcement mechanisms and appeals. It also includes a review clause requiring the operation of the amendments to be reviewed within three years. However, one part of the Bill does not sit right with me and my colleagues for a number of reasons. This is the Government's proposed ban on all flavours except tobacco. I want to be very clear that I support regulating flavours. I support banning names and marketing tactics targeted at children. The Bill prohibits flavour descriptors and language other than basic flavour names for vapes, and I think this is the right approach. However, strangely, despite allowing for different flavours, only two flavours have been included in the draft Bill, namely, tobacco or unflavoured. In plain language, that means a ban on all vape flavours except tobacco. This is not a minor issue as it goes to the heart of whether this legislation has struck the right balance between protecting children and respecting adults while also keeping sight of the central public health objective. Unfortunately, the Government has gone too far. The proposed flavour ban is an overreach into the personal decision of adults. It risks being counterproductive and enabling a black market where all of the products that we all want gone, including single-use vapes, the unsafe chemical products and the cheap imports from questionable manufacturers, will actually thrive. It reflects a simplistic view that vaping can be treated as though it is exactly the same as smoking, and that the answer to youth vaping is simply to strip vaping products of any appeal, regardless of the wider consequences. It risks drawing people back into smoking, which is the most serious issue for me and that is a very strong message I have heard from vapers. This is where I have my disagreement with the Government. Let me be very clear on what I do support. I support the regulation of nicotine consumption products, including nicotine pouches. These products should not sit outside the law. They should be regulated and they should not be sold to children. I support the prohibition on the sale to under-18s. Children should not be able to buy nicotine products, end of story. That should not be controversial. What is controversial is that the Government was far too slow to act in the first place. It took years to ban the sale of vapes to children, or to ban colourful, single-use vapes. I support the restrictions on advertising and on point of sale display and putting these products behind the counter and out of sight in mixed-retail units. I support tighter controls on packaging, imagery, colours and device design, particularly where these things are clearly aimed at attracting children and teenagers. I support measures to stop the production and sale of devices that resemble toys or games or that are effectively gamified nicotine products. This is reprehensible and indefensible and it is, if we are being honest, a blatant attempt to hook children and young people and of course that should be stopped. I support stronger penalties and stronger enforcement powers. Laws mean very little if they cannot be enforced and we have been here before in different areas in relation to that. Anyone who sells vapes or cigarettes or nicotine products to children or who ignores age restrictions or breaks display rules or flouts advertising rules should, of course, face real and heavy consequences. I support the broader approach in the Bill because it is intended to future-proof regulation rather than forcing the State to scramble after every new product category that comes onto the market. Let us be honest about the problem we are trying to solve. There has been a sharp and a deeply worrying rise in vaping among young people, including many who never smoked and were never nicotine dependent before. That trend is real. It is serious and requires intervention but it also requires honesty about how we got here. The Government was far too slow to ban the sale of vapes to under-18s. It was far too slow to tackle aggressive youth-targeted marketing, and children were exposed to brightly coloured packaging, open retail displays and products designed to look like novelty items. We should not now pretend that every problem can be traced back to flavours alone. This brings me to what I believe should happen instead of what has been proposed by the Government. My position is that the range of flavours should be limited to a small number of standard flavours under purely descriptive names. This is what they have done in New Zealand where vape flavours must be from a list under seven categories. I think the list in New Zealand is a bit too long and I would support a very tight list of a handful of flavours. That is a proportionate alternative. We have to recognise the rights of adults to make decisions for themselves. It also requires acknowledgement of the very significant difference in harm between smoking and vaping, and it addresses the legitimate concern that childish, novelty-based flavouring systems can be used to target young people, because the reality is many adults who vape are also former smokers. The central public health question should always be whether policy helps move people away from smoking, which remains far more harmful, or whether it makes that transition more difficult. If we reduce vaping to tobacco flavour only, we may well reduce its appeals relative to cigarettes, and I think that is a real risk. If the effect of this measure is to push some people back towards smoking, or to stop some smokers switching in the first place, then that is a serious mistake. This Bill should start with a limited number of flavours and if after all the measures have been implemented we do not see progress, of course, we can always review what is being done. There is another practical problem with the Government's approach because flavoured vapes and components for mixing liquids at home are readily available online. They will continue to be available online, even if they are banned in this State. We can pass laws but we cannot legislate away the Internet. Therefore, a blanket ban is likely to inconvenience law-abiding adults and legitimate retailers while creating an opening for a black market which means unregulated, low quality and potentially unsafe products. I do not believe that is smart public health policy. A ban is always an easy tool to reach for. It sounds clean and decisive and there are times, of course, when a ban is the right approach. The sale of nicotine products to children should be banned. Aggressive marketing tactics aimed at children should be banned. Devices made to look like toys should be banned but the same logic does not justify banning all flavours except tobacco for adults. To reduce youth vaping we need effective age verification at the point of sale, backed up by strong penalties for those who break the rules. We need to ban the advertising of these products, ban child-focused packaging and stamp out the marketing tactics that prey on children and teenagers. We need to keep these products out of sight, behind the counter where adults who are trying to quit smoking can still access them but where they are not pushed in front of every person who walks into the shop. We need the HSE and enforcement authorities to up their game. The Minister of State should not reach for a blunt instrument where a more proportionate tool is available. This Bill contains a great deal that is necessary and overdue. I support those measures I outlined earlier but I cannot support the blanket ban on flavours. I have put forward what I believe is a much more proportionate path. That path is to protect children, to respect adults, to make sure that we reduce the incidence of smoking and vaping, and to keep public health policy anchored in common sense.

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