WORK IS UNDERWAY to “eradicate” nicotine pouches, Health Minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill has said, calling them “particularly invidious”. 

Speaking to reporters at the World Conference on Tobacco Control 2025 in the Convention Centre Dublin, she said the pouches “have the capacity to get very high doses of nicotine to children in very subtle ways, but very, very quickly”.

“So we’re working to try to eradicate them,” said the minister. 

The small pouches, which users put inside their lips to obtain a hit of nicotine, fall outside the parameters of Irish laws on tobacco or vapes.

Director of the National Association of Principals and Deputy Principals, Paul Crone has previously urged the HSE to issue a health advisory around the use of these small pouches, stating that students find it easier to conceal nicotine pouches than traditional tobacco products. 

The minister added that the government will also move to legislate to get rid of point of sale advertising of vapes and nicotine pouches.

“Essentially to make these e-cigarettes, which have already been banned for under 18s, as unattractive and as boring as possible,” she said. 

Speaking at the same conference yesterday, Taoiseach Micheál Martin said the introduction of vaping was “the revenge of Big Tobacco” with an aim to get nicotine “back on the agenda”. 

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He promised significant restrictions coming in next February will have a big impact. 

The health minister said today there is no need for a coconut or pineapple flavour in these products, stating that companies trying to make these products attractive is trying to “normalise what is essentially an addiction to a drug”. 

Carroll MacNeill said that on a European level there is a need to reopen the tobacco directive, which she said will be a key objective when Ireland holds the EU presidency next year.

“The world has moved on since that was agreed and that it’s not just about tobacco, it’s about the other nicotine projects… But one of the issues there is where one country takes lots of steps to ban different products. It comes so easily across the border from another EU member state, so we have to take a harmonised approach on it from a public health perspective,” said the minister.