The Labour Party welcomes and supports this Bill to ban single-use vapes. We also want to make it clear that this is one small part of an overall jigsaw that is required in a public health and environmental response to vaping. There has been an explosion in the number of people vaping over the past decade. There are figures reporting 7% of adults and 16% of 15- to 16-year-olds are currently vaping. The Lancet back in 2023 reported that in 2015, 10% of young people were vaping and now that is up to 30%. Any of us walking around our communities can see that with our eyes. Anybody involved in Tidy Towns can tell us what is happening on our streets. That requires a response. I accept the bona fides of vaping in terms of harm reduction and assisting people in smoking cessation. That is true for many adults, but there is also another reality and another clear picture out there that a new dependency has emerged. For us, this is one small piece of the overall public health response that needs to happen. We look forward to the Bill that will regulate advertising. The advertising for nicotine inhaling products is probably an even bigger issue. We also need to make sure that we future-proof the legislation. It might be vapes of a particular type today. We spent a lot of time during the summer talking about HSC vapes. We are now talking about the legal vapes. There will be another product into the future. The reality for us at the moment is that the nicotine industry, because that is who is driving the sale and growth of vapes, are creating a new generation of dependants to effectively generate a profit. There is emerging evidence from within medicine that there is a high level of correlation between vaping and sleep issues, anxiety, heart and lung damage and toxin exposure. We have heard from some school principals reporting increased irritability among secondary school students. We are still very much in the infancy of vaping. It is going to be a while before we will see the long-term impacts. The critical thing is that we are not waiting around like we did many decades ago with smoking to see what the long-term impacts are. The State needs to respond. Regarding the environmental reasoning behind this Bill, there is a clear environmental purpose to this Bill. A total of 31 million vapes were sold in Ireland last year. Yet just 1.1 million vapes were recycled. Thirty-one million vapes is one third of all electronic devices sold in Ireland. I was shocked when I saw those figures. The reality is that vapes are simply not being recycled. There are clear concerns about the level of awareness out there about how to dispose of the waste. Effectively, this is an electrical good. They are a significant source of litter containing both plastic and lithium-ion batteries. We cannot tolerate the throwing away into general waste of vapes. There are significant issues here. There is the banning of the single-use vape, but also the compliance with the waste electrical and electronic equipment, WEEE, directive of vapes that can be used repeatedly. While there are those products out there, there are key concerns with regard to the price point of those products, which would bring into question the incentive of any individual to recycle or do something with the vape when they are priced at such a low point. Enforcement is going to be very important now with regards to the ban on the single-use vapes, but also in terms of the appropriate disposal of the multiuse vapes as well. Regarding the health issue, nicotine is highly addictive and harmful. It has an impact on adolescent brain development. Yet, significant numbers of teenagers and young people are now vaping. As Deputy Donnelly eloquently said, there are people who never smoked who are now taking up vaping. That has to be a public health concern. We cannot have a new generation - another generation - effectively addicted to nicotine products with all the issues that go by that. There is a certain irony here that there has been longstanding target of Government, which was set back in 2013, to have smoking prevalence at a rate of 5% by this year. The figures are three or four times that at the moment, but we have a target for the reduction of smoking. We do not have anything with regards to vaping. We need to look at that. Regarding single-use versus the multiuse vapes, the price point is something that we need to look at. We in the Labour Party urge the Minister of State to give serious consideration to minimum pricing, or indeed a taxation. Again, there will be people looking at this who want to give up smoking. They are looking for an alternative and want that help. I accept that they would feel aggrieved when they heard that message, but we have to look at who is taking up vaping who has never smoked a day in their life and wonder how we can tackle some of that as well. We asked a parliamentary question in September as to the Department of Health's initiatives regarding vaping cessation. There is a well-established smoking cessation programme, which is decently funded by the Department, in place now for many years. When we asked the question about somebody who presents who wants to give up vaping, we are told that the Department has no funding in place. That is a concern. This would not require a large amount of money. If we are serious about recognising the health impacts and that significant numbers of young people are taking up vaping, we need to have a vaping cessation programme that may or may not look like the smoking cessation programme. It certainly needs to be developed. My final message is that we welcome this Bill. We will support the passage of this Bill, but we want to see an awful lot more coming from the Department of Health with regards to vaping. To be frank about it, the Department is hugely behind the curve. We worry about industry pressure on the Department given the very slow pace of bringing initiatives to the Dáil and Seanad on vaping. The crystal clear thing has to be that we recognise that vaping is a significant issue now in our society both in health and environmental terms. The Government needs to get to grip with it.

Sentiment score: 0.06