Ireland is close to becoming the first European Union country to raise the minimum age required to buy tobacco above 18 years of legal responsibility for its citizens.
According to the Irish Minister for Health and the member of government responsible for public health and drug strategy, the cabinet has drafted a bill to raise the minimum age required to buy tobacco to 21 years from 18. So far out of Europe, only Latvia has raised the age limit for buying tobacco in its legislation to 20 years and Ireland will become the first country within the EU to do similar.
Ireland was the first country in Europe and the world to impose a ban on smoking in enclosed and public areas in 2004, citing the status of most as workplaces, followed by New Zealand and Italy, while Canada was the first country in the world to impose the use of illustrated health warnings on cigarette packets in 2001.
The drafted bill will not affect persons under the age of 21 who were also over 18 before the enactment of the respective law. If approved, the bill will not apply to innovative vape and nicotine products, which will continue to be sold exclusively to adults as of last December.
The “creation” of a smoke-free generation planned to be imposed through the force of the law in Great Britain by Rishi Sunak will not be possible to spread from there and be adopted from Ireland according to the legal advice initially given to its government, owing to the EU Single Market and the European Tobacco Products Directive (TPD).
The raising of the minimum age for tobacco purchase to 21, however, aims to reduce the percentage of Irish smokers to the desired rate of 5% by most states and has been in place since 2019 for most US states since the presidency of Donald Trump. Since then, smoking rates in the United States have fallen dramatically to the lowest recorded rate of 11% of the total population. The current proportion of Irish people who smoke is 18% of those over 15 (in Great Britain the same figure is 13.5%).
SCRAP THE SMOKING BAN 
The usual bullshit war from “hygienic antismokers”!!! If someone wants to smoke, must be totally free to buy and use tobacco related products, regardless the age. Someone selects to smoke, because he/she gets pleasure from it. Smoking habbit is pleasurable for every age. Any stupid age restrictions, are just trying to deny to get the pleasure from tobacco related products, if somenine selects to do so.
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Fair enough, although that doesn’t mean that children should be able to exchange money for tobacco. So you are saying that although tobacco cannot be bought by youngsters, that doesn’t mean that it should not be allowed for under-21’s who are above the age of majority of 18. There is a reason to support that to counter generational smoking bans. There are worse things that are much worse. The article talks about Ireland that is next to the UK, where the population is threatened by the government with an incremental ban on purchasing tobacco. It is better to give them the opportunity to do that and raise the age requirement to 21 than have them increase it by a year every year and eliminate tobacco use and its eligibility for everybody. An age restriction of a constant value is not an anti-smoking restriction but is called regulation, and regulations exist for socially sought purposes. Existing anti-smoking restrictions which are not regulations, do not serve any social purpose nor are they a social rule that gets reflected by the law, they are dictated commands that have been written onto the law to serve external purposes to the law that are irrelevant with its remaining content. They have been enacted in the absence of society by the state under its sole initiative. Setting the age limit to 21 is not one of those dictated commands that enact blackmail with the citizens to obey instructions of not smoking inside buildings etc. It is a form of compromise to having something worse enacted namely incremental tobacco purchase bans.
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