…Mr. Chris Macey: The Irish Heart Foundation welcomes the opportunity to discuss chapter 15 of the report of the Commission on Taxation and Welfare. We also welcome the commission's strong backing for the use of taxation as a lever to improve public health in Ireland. In particular, we support its recommendation to help tackle Ireland's obesity crisis through additional fiscal measures to incentivise reformulation of unhealthy foods. This is the focus of our statement, although taxation continues to play a critical role in tobacco control and alcohol policy… 

Mr. Chris Macey: The committee was looking at the commission's report. In our view, the commission has made sensible recommendations and proposals around this. We want to support it. We want this issue to be aired fully. We want the public health aspects of it to come through. We have done this on tobacco and alcohol, which have high tax regimes. They were initially sin taxes, but are now health taxes to a large extent. We need that to come more into the ambit of food. The food and diet we have is not conducive to a healthy nation… 

Deputy Patricia Ryan: I agree with Mr. Macey completely. I see it at first hand. I have been dealing with people who would have been very obese and were perhaps dealing with gastric bypasses or gastric sleeves and so on. Since Covid, and I believe we are all a little guilty, people may have gone back to their old ways. Perhaps it is for another committee but we must discuss the fact that people who may have had the surgery are being left and have not been dealt with since Covid. Maybe we need to be re-educating them. In some cases, many of them are going back to their old ways and one will see that the weight is creeping on after surgery. Maybe we need to target people like that who have had surgeries. I do not know how we would deal with that but perhaps it is something we need to look at also. 

Does Mr. Macey have any comment to make on the impact of the current taxation of alcohol and tobacco and how it should evolve going forward? 

Mr. Chris Macey: These taxes started as sin taxes and revenue raisers and have become very much public health taxes. There is an element of alcohol, in small doses such as a glass of red wine, where there is evidence it can actually be good for a person's cardiovascular health. This would be a small amount of red wine occasionally and that type of thing. This is a little more complex than tobacco which is just bad for you. For a long time we have advocated for the €20 pack of cigarettes. Certainly taxation has been the biggest weapon in reducing smoking rates in Ireland, and particularly in stopping the take-up of smoking among young people. Unfortunately, that is now starting to change and for the first time in a generation the youth smoking rate is increasing. It is not proven yet but there appears to be a link to that and the rise of e-cigarettes and the rise of nicotine addiction through that. We are proposing that there is some taxation on e-cigarettes that is not high enough to stop people who are genuinely using them to try to quit smoking, but will be high enough to stop children using them. There has been a huge explosion in child and youth use of e-cigarettes. These measures are really important. The taxation of cigarettes and tobacco takes in some €1 billion a year for the State. It spends around 1% of that in helping people to quit but 70% to 80% of people who smoke want to quit and they are not getting enough help to do that. The last figure I saw on this was €30 million per year being spent on the whole panoply of tobacco control measures or smoking cessation measures but it is not enough. These are people who are addicted to one of the most addictive substances on the planet. They need more help. 

Deputy Patricia Ryan: As legislators, what would Mr. Macey want us to do? 

Mr. Chris Macey: The €12 million being spent per year on helping people to quit should be quadrupled to €50 million and we should take a much more serious approach to it. The evidence is really clear that when people get help it increases the chances that they are going to quit. However, the first thing that gets cut when there is any pressure on the HSE is the quit services. This has happened constantly over the years. Those services are very patchy around the country. In some places they would be good and in other places they will not be. Regardless of where a person lives, if it is going to help then he or she should have it, and particularly when they are paying that amount of money in additional tax on top of all the other taxes they pay to the State….