Deputy David Cullinane: I move amendment No. 1:

In page 9, between lines 27 and 28, to insert the following:

“Review of operation of Act, Act of 2002 and Act of 2015

9. The Minister shall, within 24 months after the passing of this Act, carry out a review of the operation of this Act, the Act of 2002, and the Act of 2015, to also examine:

(a) the regulation of flavouring, packaging, and advertisement of nicotine inhaling products;

(b) the regulation of disposable tobacco products and nicotine inhaling products;

(c) the evidence base for calculating licence fees, the appropriateness of fees which have been set, and potential methodologies for calculating such fees;

(d) issues arising from the implementation of the Acts and attempts to circumvent the Acts, such as proxy purchasing;

(e) the pricing of tobacco products and nicotine inhaling products, including bulk purchasing, and options for standardising tobacco unit prices;

(f) regulating or prohibiting tobacco price lists.”

I move this amendment for a number of reasons. Primarily, the reason I went for this type of amendment was that like with the previous Bill, I take the view that we have a very good starting point. I very much welcome what the vaping Bill does. We had very lengthy discussion at the pre-legislative scrutiny stage. We did an awful lot of pre-legislative scrutiny on this Bill. There were lots of different stakeholders and people who obviously wanted to have their say, including the Irish Cancer Society and many others as well. Obviously there were a lot of people who had a very keen interest in this. We all want the same thing. We all want people to move away from cigarettes. We want people to smoke less, live longer and all of that. If possible, we do not want people vaping or smoking. That is what we all want in an ideal world. At the same time, there were issues that needed to be addressed and I think a lot of them are addressed in the Bill. However, some are not. I assume the Minister is not going to accept our amendments to some of these areas anyway but at the very least I was hoping he would agree with what I feel would be a better way to approach it. Because of a discussion we had on a previous Bill where we talked about the length of time a review might take, we went for 24 months in this amendment. The logic of it is that some of the areas that we talked about should be subject to a review. They include the regulation of flavouring, packaging and advertisements. Flavouring was one of those issues that got a lot of attention. Deputy Shortall has tabled an amendment, which I will support. My view is that it needs to be looked at it. It was very clear to me in the pre-legislative scrutiny process that there is a strong body of opinion that flavoured vaping is directed at children.

I understand that when we try to come at this from the point of view of banning advertising and all of that, that will play some part in it. I know we discussed this in the past but maybe the Minister could give us an indication as to whether the Department has done more research in this area. What is being cited to us is research coming from the European Union and from other OECD countries that have looked at very similar proposals. They are also looking at the patterns and the research that underpins why children are vaping in the first place, and what the attraction is. We all know the types of flavours that are out there. To any reasonable person, it seems that it is directed at children and trying to get people into vaping. Vaping, as some would suggest from the industry, is a step down from cigarettes, and that is the reason there is flavouring.

It is something that certainly needs to be reviewed. There is an amendment that I will support but at the very least I think we have to be committing to looking at this again in the future. That is similarly the case with regard to the banning of disposable vapes, if it has not already been done; the calculation of fees, once these are established; and the pricing of tobacco products, with particular regard to bulk purchasing. One can see a number of other areas as well. Rather than putting individual amendments down on all of those, my preferred option was that we would pass this Bill and make sure that it does what it does. Then in the future, within 24 months, we would have more time to look at all those issues where there was not agreement, when maybe more research will be done and we can come to more informed decisions, and whether it is this Government or the next Government, they can be looked at again.

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