More than half of the cigarettes examined in a new survey had not had Irish excise duty paid on them.<\/p>\n
The survey, commissioned by Japan Tobacco International (JTI) Ireland, looked at over 5,000 packs of cigarettes taken at random from towns and cities across the country earlier this year.<\/p>\n
It found 57 per cent of the packs had no exchequer duty paid on them, while 14 per cent of them were illegal counterfeits.<\/p>\n
Counterfeit cigarettes are cigarettes manufactured without the authorisation of the brand owners.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Galway had the highest proportion of non-Irish duty-paid cigarettes, with three-quarters of the packs examined falling into that category. In Dublin the figures was two-thirds.<\/p>\n
Wexford had the highest rate of counterfeit cigarettes, at 25 per cent.<\/p>\n
The survey involved 5,000 empty packs of cigarettes being collected randomly from streets and public bins across Ireland\u2019s 22 largest cities and towns between 16th February and 3rd April 2026. <\/p>\n
Researchers then examined the packs to identify where they came from, whether Irish taxes had been paid on them, and to determine if they were illegal counterfeit products.<\/p>\n
JTI owns tobacco brands including Benson & Hedges, Silk Cut, and Amber Leaf.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than half of the cigarettes examined in a new survey had not had Irish excise duty paid…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":593064,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[72,61,60],"class_list":["post-593063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=593063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593063\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/593064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=593063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=593063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=593063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}