Jen Cummins

Overall sentiment: 0.05
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I welcome the opportunity to speak on vapes again. I spoke about it in September and said vapes are the bane of many parents and their children. I have been contacted since then, and was contacted prior to that, about how vapes cause so many arguments in families. As parents, we thought children do not smoke anymore and young people do not smoke but now we have vapes. When I was sitting here I wondered how much a vape costs. A vape is about €10 but a packet of cigarettes is about €23, so it is significantly cheaper to buy vapes and you can get your nicotine hit much more cheaply. Part of the difficulty is every year we put up the price of cigarettes but maybe we need to think about that for vapes as well to make it prohibitive for people to buy them. I am talking specifically about young people for the reason that I am a mother of four and vaping comes up quite a lot. It comes up with my friends and constituents that young people are really affecting their health and there is not a widespread understanding of how bad vapes are for people. It is an addictive substance that damages lungs and people. I spoke to a beautician who mentioned the number of young people she saw who had poor skin because of vaping. There are all these things that do not get talked about and the challenge is something I talked about in September. I was quoted in the newspaper. I was not being flippant at the time, but people can get vapes to match their outfits and people who use vapes do that because they are being marketed to a certain cohort. As I said in September, if I were that age, I possibly would vape. I was not that fashion conscious to be honest at that age, but I probably would have been looking to be part of that marketing thing. It is clever and we are behind, in that we are not challenging these companies and this business in the way we can. In September, I spoke about the fact that under-18s were being sold vapes even though it was not allowed. At the time, I asked whether anyone was ever prosecuted. I heard over Christmas that people had been prosecuted. I am delighted about that. Can we have more of that, please? I certainly do not want young people going to buy a substance that is bad for them that they are not supposed to be able to get. I am delighted there were prosecutions of that. Schools have had to fit particular smoke alarms to detect vapes and that is an additional cost for schools that they should not have. There is a lot of research on health issues and schools are doing great work to try to let young people know that it is as detrimental to their health as smoking a packet of cigarettes. I am delighted to see that and I commend schools that are doing that and supporting parents to make sure they understand the situation as well. As the previous speaker said, single-use vapes are a challenge environmentally - they are just used and then dumped - but as Deputy Sheehan said, those that can be charged, which are just a notch up from being disposable, are a challenge as well. All the wires have to be disposed of. It is detrimental to our environment. This conversation is timely. I would love to see us get to a situation where we do not have to continue to talk about it and we are able to make sure all those things are implemented for people not to be reliant on vapes. When vapes came out, I had family members who used them to try to come off cigarettes. However, that was years ago and they are still using vapes. They could perhaps stop using cigarettes, but they are using vapes. I was happy to hear the Government was looking at legislation to ban the use of vapes in pubs, restaurants and so forth. Happy days. I cannot stand the smell, as I am sure lots of people cannot. If we cannot smoke in there, we should not be able to vape there either. I look forward to the day we do not have to worry about young people having access to vapes, when they are not attracted to them and when we have restrictions in place on people who sell these products. Before I finish, there is also the issue of nicotine pouches that are being used by young people and that are hugely problematic for their health. We are not talking about that specifically today, but we need to talk about it. Big nicotine companies are profiting from the ill-health of our young people and other citizens.

Sentiment score: 0.10

I should have kept talking.

Sentiment score: 0.00