With Budget 2026 bringing an expected rise in the price of cigarettes, packets are now nearly €20 each.

This has prompted an increase in cigarette smuggling and the sale of knock-off brands, to such an extent that cigarette manufacturers employ investigators to spy on the dodgy smokes trade.

Consumer affairs correspondent for the Irish Times Conor Pope said that this is an “absolutely massive problem”.

“I think an awful lot of non-smokers perhaps don’t appreciate the scale of the illicit tobacco trade in this country – and indeed everywhere in the world,” he told Moncrieff.

“By conservative estimates, around one-in-four cigarettes that are smoked in Ireland are contraband or counterfeit cigarettes.

“They are brought into the country, or they’re manufactured illegally in this country or in other countries – and you or I might say, ‘Well, sure, I don’t care’.

“Why do I care if big tobacco is losing money? Because, let’s face it, they are hardly paragons of virtue.”

Redhead irish woman smoking cigarette on beach in sunny Northern Ireland

However, Mr Pope said that these illegal activities are costing the exchequer – and therefore Irish taxpayers - around €600 million a year in lost revenue.

"So, in the first instance, you might have somebody who travels to Tenerife where there’s a really big duty-free zone, right?” he said.

“They might be buying [a] suitcase full of cigarettes and bringing them home to Ireland and then selling them on.”

However, according to Mr Pope, this is probably “the least significant avenue”.

Criminals

“But big criminal enterprises all over the world are also smuggling into this country – and indeed, to other countries – millions of tons of tobacco,” he said.

“So, millions of tons of tobacco will be crossing the world every single year illegally, and in many respects, it’s a very low risk, high reward enterprise.

“Because if you’re bringing in illegal tobacco into the Republic of Ireland, you don’t have to deal with the dodgiest of drug kingpins.”

Breaking Bad. Image: AJ Pics / Alamy.

Mr Pope said the third aspect of this underground black-market is “illegal tobacco factories”.

“You kind of might say to yourself, ‘It’d be really hard to set up a tobacco factory’,” he said.

“But apparently, there was one I think last year or maybe earlier this year in Dublin 11... All you need is a building and some of the machinery that would be used to make tobacco.

“A lot of that machinery is being sold on the black market and it’s coming from totally legitimate sources [like] decommissioned tobacco factories across Europe.”

Mr Pope said while there is supposedly a slight difference in quality between these knock-off smokes and the real deal, it is not enough to counteract the difference in price between the two.

Main image: A man smoking a cigarette. Image: Jes2ufoto / Alamy Stock Photo