I echo the concerns raised by my colleagues across the House today. The sales of single-use vapes to minors and their use of these vapes have reached epidemic levels in Ireland. The vaping industry has deliberately exploited this reality. The figures are incredible. WEEE Ireland found that vapes accounted for 33% of all electronic devices sold in 2024. That is a huge percentage. These brightly coloured, sweetly flavoured products are targeting vulnerable young people in particular who are unaware of the serious long-term dangers that they pose. As the Taoiseach rightly said, vapes are the revenge of the tobacco industry and they have the potential to bring another generation back into addiction. We have all seen it at first hand throughout the city. You cannot walk around Dublin without seeing several young people vaping. While the sale of vapes to those under 18 has been banned since 2023, more than one in five vape shops have been found to be in breach of the law in this regard. They are profiting directly from the addiction of young people to substances that have been increasingly linked to serious negative health outcomes. I understand that many have found vaping to be a useful tool for getting away from smoking. It is clear now that this is a minority of those who purchase vapes on an ongoing basis. The 2024 Irish report of the European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs, ESPAD, indicated that more than three quarters of e-cigarette users had never smoked traditional cigarettes in their lives and just 0.6% used them as a means of stopping, getting away or transitioning from smoking. The environmental damage is the other side and it is equally alarming. A typical disposable vape contains a battery of approximately 550 milliamp hours. As these batteries are built into tightly sealed, single-use devices, getting them out of these devices safely and recovering the metals inside is nigh impossible. At the waste-to-energy facility in Poolbeg, I have seen the potential risk of even small lithium batteries. They get into the fire chamber, explode and cause all sorts of issues. There are millions of small batteries now being disposed of, often incorrectly, representing not only a big waste of materials but also putting a lot of pressure on recycling infrastructure in the city and down the country in dealing with that waste. When they are thrown away, they can leak toxic substances into the environment. These include heavy metals like mercury, lead and bromide along with battery acid and, as I mentioned, lithium. Lithium is a combustible component of batteries. Some e-cigarettes contain such high levels of hazardous waste chemicals that they should actually be classified as hazardous waste. If we are serious about reducing waste and protecting the environment in Ireland, we simply cannot justify selling single-use electronic devices like these on an ongoing basis. I commend the Minister of State, and the Minister, Deputy Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, for advancing this legislation and recognising the scale of the challenge, for young people in particular, that we now face. We cannot ignore the growing evidence of harm that vaping poses for young people. We have to step into this, lean into it and deal with it. The progress Ireland has made in preventing smoking among new generations is at real risk of being reversed by these toxic and wasteful products unless we take the action.

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