Today, I want to raise something that has been not only on my mind, but brought up to me a lot over the last couple of months. It is a Bill that will be going into the Dáil next week, on vaping and on the banning of flavours. I will give the Leader a rundown. My own story is a lot like many stories. I started smoking in 1992. The first time I ever tried to give them up was in 2012. I went into a vape shop and bought a vape. The first question I was asked was what kind of cigarettes I smoked. They matched you to your tobacco flavour. I lasted two-and-a-half days on the vape. It was disgusting. I could not continue and went back on cigarettes. Seven years ago, I gave them up when I found flavours. Since then, I have stayed off cigarettes. I can guarantee 110% that if the flavours go, it will not only be me back on cigarettes; it will be a lot of people. I have been told that since the tax went on, people are buying tobacco pouches and making their own cigarettes because it works out cheaper now to buy a pouch of tobacco and make cigarettes than to buy the liquid for their vapes.

The rationale behind it is to stop children vaping, and I completely agree. There is a law there. The law was brought in a couple of years ago. Under-18s cannot be sold vapes. We should enforce the law instead of punishing every adult who uses flavoured vapes to stop themselves from smoking tobacco, which, we have been told, is bad for us. I hold my hand up. I did not give them up for health reasons. I never had a health issue when I was on them. I gave them up for money reasons. That was the only reason I gave them up. As I said, if the flavours are gone, it will not be against my belief to go back on cigarettes because it was a money reason for giving them up, not anything else.

We need to enforce the law instead of punishing people. We will have an awful spiral of people going back on cigarettes. We have spent so much time trying to get people off them, with the smoking ban, all the health aspects of it that have come out through the HSE and all the campaigning. We will have an awful turnaround.

We should provide for generic packaging, as we did with cigarettes. They should have generic packaging. Let us take away all those lovely colours and the shop fronts and put them generic. We should have them in behind the boxes, as we have the cigarettes sold in every grocery store and every shop corner. You can buy cigarettes but they are hidden away. They are not in the nice shiny packaging.

There are lots of ways we could do this but a collective punishment is not the way to do it. We will have an awful spiral of people going back on cigarettes. I hold my hand up - I will be honest - I will be the first.