It is very strange that the majority of us here seem to be from Carlow and Kilkenny. The Labour Party and I welcome the general thrust of what the Minister of State is trying to do with this Bill. I stand here as someone who has struggled an awful lot with nicotine addiction. It is something that personally I have found very hard to overcome for a number of years. I have been on again and off again. I have been smoking cigarettes and have been off cigarettes, I have been smoking cigarettes and I have been off cigarettes, and I have been vaping. I have found that of all of the different methods of nicotine consumption, vaping is the worst of them, and especially in relation to single-use vapes. Here in my pocket I have an old Elf Bar vape which I found in the drawer in my office. There was one stage when I went through four and five of those in any given week. I agree with what the Taoiseach said when he spoke about vaping being the "revenge of the tobacco industry". The fact is that the tobacco industry is so inventive it will find any way it can to get past whatever level of regulation comes in. We are seeing this right now with nicotine pouches. If vaping is the revenge of the tobacco industry then nicotine pouches are the revenge of the vaping industry. I have been shocked by this. I know, and I hope, that the Minister of State will be dealing with this soon with a separate piece of legislation. I was shocked when I went into a local shop near my house a couple of months ago and was offered a nicotine pouch. I was asked did I want to sample a nicotine pouch for nothing. I could not believe it. The pouch was literally put on the counter of the shop and offered to me. I want to make a number of points in relation to some potential loopholes that may appear. We know that single-use vapes have been banned in the UK. We know that the legislation there has had some success, but at the same time there have been issues with so-called fake reusable vapes. We are already beginning to see this here. Consider the Elf Bar vape that I have here. One can buy this Elf Bar vape right now in any given shop or petrol station with a little charging port and a part that comes off, like the lid comes off the body of it. That is, essentially, the same product as the pre-existing disposable vapes. There have been issues in the UK in this regard. I would welcome the Minister of State and the Department looking into this issue whereby the industry is attaching a bit of a charging point or nominally making the pod removable in order to qualify the device as being reusable. The tobacco and vape industry need to be mandated to have a particular type of pod or a series of maybe three or different pods. I make that point because in being cognisant of the role vaping plays for certain people in smoking cessation, which is important, we need to ensure when we ban single-use vapes and people are purchasing vapes that they are buying, say, a substantial vape that comes with a standard set of pods that they will not just throw in the bin after they have used it. The issue the UK has had with this small change of pod design is it is just enough in terms of its legislation for big tobacco or big nicotine to dodge the definition of disposable. Deputy Callaghan said we do not want our children to be the nicotine industry's test subjects but they already are. I was in a local secondary school recently and the staff were talking about the sheer amount of vapes they find in a given week. I was talking to caretaker who I am quite friendly with and he told me at least twice in a given month he has to call some sort of drain specialist out to this secondary school, which is small enough, because somebody has tried to flush a single-use vape, which could be an Elf Bar or Lost Mary vape, down the toilet where it then gets caught. Government needs to come forward with a specific strategy on vaping cessation because we have a generation of people who were smokers and then use vaping to give up smoking, which is fine and legitimate, but we are going to have a generation of people who will have just vaped and there are no targeted resources or an information campaign targeted at getting them off the vapes. That is really important. It is urgent and important, as I said, that as soon as the Minister of State is finished with this legislation she move on to the nicotine pouches because the advertising of those has already started. I go over and back to the UK a good bit and the vast majority of people I know who use single-use vapes are in my peer group and maybe use them when they have a few drinks. They are already starting, especially friends of mine who live in the likes of London and Liverpool, to move over to nicotine pouches. They moved over to the pouches because they knew the ban on vapes was coming in the UK. The advertisers had moved and it all clicks in like that, so it is really important this is all being done this year and that we keep an eye on what the UK has done to see how we can tweak and tighten up our legislation based on the loopholes the UK has had with, for example, the black market and the idea of a vape being, ipso facto, reusable when it is not in reality. A big awareness campaign is needed on vaping but specifically on the implications for waste providers and recycling companies. I have visited bin companies in Limerick. I visited Mr. Binman a couple of months ago and I was told about the number of fires the company has in bin trucks due to single-use vapes exploding or bursting into flames. It is unbelievable. The company had an incident a couple of months ago when it had to dump a bin truck in a residential housing estate because of a fire. The message really needs to get out to people that they should not throw these things in the bin because when they get crushed the lithium ion battery will be crushed and this will cause a fire or potentially an explosion.

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