A publicans' rebellion is brewing in Co Kerry over the smoking ban, even as the Fianna Fail Ardfheis comes to town. Kathy Sheridan listens to the bar talk.
Kilgarvan in south Kerry, seat of the Healy-Rae dynasty and home to five pubs. The modest hostelry run by the family for 32 years still carries Jackie's name over the door. It's the quintessential country local. Handwritten advertisements for barley straw and silage are stuck to the wall and a self-possessed 15-year-old mans the bar.
This is Dan, grandson of Jackie, the TD, and son of Danny, the newly-crowned county councillor. Danny runs the pub now. He is otherwise occupied, however, "up a mountain" for the day.
This is the pub for which Jackie has promised to do time rather than enforce a smoking ban. "I'll have to because there is no way I'd turn long-standing friends against me," he said last week.
There is no comparison, he maintained, between the clientele of a rural pub like his and the "big city pubs" which the Minister for Health has in mind. "We have customers, about five or six customers at around 11 or 12 in the morning. They will walk in and sit down in the little corner that they always sit down. They will get half a whiskey . . . and they'll light a cigarette and they'll smoke it away with their drink and maybe after an hour or two, they'll talk and chat about what's happening around. You can't catch these people and throw them out on the road . . ." And sure enough, the pub's sole, pint-drinking, fag-puffing patron at about midday on Wednesday, confirms the last part at least. "What would I do if Dan said I had to put the fag out?" muses Michael O'Reilly, a mild-mannered 41-year-old. "I'd put him out the door - he'd go first. Oh Dan'd go first".
Michael is a 25-a-day man, the kind who got caught smoking on a plane over the Atlantic. "Most of the bars around here are working men's bars. You go for a pint after work. The aul' fag and a pint go hand in hand."
"'Tisn't right," young Dan agrees. "'Tis a public place. People should be left to do what they want. It's bad for them of course - but if they want to smoke, 'tis up to themselves."
Then he hands me his mobile on which he has called his father, to speak from the mountain top.
Danny's points are well rehearsed. Little family pubs like theirs can only afford one person manning it, so they can't go following people around the pub and into the toilet to police their smoking; about half of his customers are smokers and he has never heard a non-smoker begrudge them; the five Kilgarvan pubs are in agreement, "well, four of us anyway".
He recites the penances that have been sent to try rural publicans by "the smart back-room boys above in Dublin". There's the new law, for example, which says that under-18s can't even stand in from the rain now in the pub, waiting to be collected off the bus by parents, and another one that expects publicans to know how intoxicated a customer is, when even gardaí need breathalysers to determine that. "Of course, there would have been no word about this but for the problems in the health service . . . The backroom boys came up with this to get the people's minds off the problems and it has worked tremendously."
Would he go to jail? "I'd have to face the consequences," he says. "But tell me this, if cigarettes are really so bad, why not just take them off the market altogether?" It's a question that resonates around Co Kerry.
By now, the pub's patronage has grown by two, Kilgarvan-born Pat and Margaret Reidy, back for a holiday from the US. They are opposed to the ban, although Pat wouldn't call himself a smoker, of course. "I only smoke when I have a pint. A lot of people wouldn't smoke unless they had a pint. They go together . . ." "Like jelly and custard," finishes Margaret. "Like bacon and cabbage," adds Michael.
But this is about protecting the health of the bar staff, after all. Does Dan think he deserves protection? "I do, I suppose," he says after some thought. "You'd go out the window so," says Michael.
Down the street, John Foley runs Ó Suilleabhain's pub while puffing on upwards of 40 cigarettes a day. His four customers - first names only, please - are highly entertained at the notion of a law to protect the bar staff. "He's blowing out more smoke than we are," snorts one.
Dominic, a 40- to 60-a-day man, has a wife, a teacher, "who'd put you out of the house for smoking . . . but at the weekend she'd have six or seven fags here", he says.
He and another customer, Pat, are ahead of the game because they once worked in a smoke-free town in Massachusetts. "The day it was brought in, everyone just stopped smoking. The risk was too great, so the publicans enforced it themselves. You couldn't even put a cigarette box up on the counter. They built decks and had shelters outside with covered pool tables. You just had to accept it . . . Mind, the weather was better," says Dominic.
They reckon that in Ireland, more people will drink at home. "When you have to drink your beer out in the open, you might as well stay home and have a party," says Pat. "I'd bring the pint outside with me for a smoke," says Dominic. But you're not allowed drink on the pavement. "Mmmh . . . I'd just give up and drink at home."
John Foley reckons that 80 per cent of his customers smoke and that some 15 to 20 per cent of those smokers do not smoke during the day. "Several lads say to me that they could leave the box of cigarettes here." Given a choice, he would put a sign up outside, saying: Non-smokers welcome here at own risk. "I know what risk is there and I'm prepared to take that risk and it should be up to the bar staff to choose whether they want to work in that environment."
Rural pubs, he says, are different to big city pubs. This is echoed around the county. "Here, it'd be much harder to tell people to put the cigarette out. We get the old people coming in at weekends - it's the only time their kids can pick them up. They come in during the day for two pints, to relax, chat, have a cigarette. They need that, they've been doing it for the last 50 years. How can I turn them away?" asks Foley.
He belongs to no lobby group. Is he prepared to defy the ban? "It's hard to say what we'll do. I don't know because I think the Government don't know. All we've heard is what we've heard through the media. We've heard nothing from the Government or the health board. We don't know if the customers will be liable. We have no information on what we're supposed to do if someone is caught lighting up in a bar."
And desisting from smoking in a pub is not the same as doing so on a plane or in the hairdresser's, he insists. "How often do you spend time in a plane? Not every evening or even once a week for most people. How long does it take to get a haircut?"
"I'm going to feel sorry for the bar staff," says Dominic.
Across the county, nasty scenarios are being trotted out: the most common is where a group of tanked-up lads get shirty. Or an embittered customer sends a friend to light up deliberately, calls the health board, and gets the owner in trouble. Then there are questions. Who do you call if someone refuses your entreaties? The issue of the unfortunate New York bouncer who was knifed for doing his job is raised in every premises. Will self-defence classes be a prerequisite for bar staff?
Foley could be as militant as any of them, while stopping short of jail. He would like to see every bar closing for the month of January: "Then see how the Government would deal with the loss of revenue and how many are out of work."
Half way between Kilgarvan and Killarney, bounded by blasted, volcanic mountains, lies the flower-bedecked Loo Bridge Bar. A plaque outside proclaims it to be Ireland's oldest pub. Inside, an open fire burns in the hearth. This pub has changed hands a number of times in a few years. Rose Carey, a 23-year-old former waitress, and a partner are currently renting it and with just the two of them staffing it in rotation, they're "managing to make a living", she says, but she's worried. Ninety per cent of her customers are smokers, "And the majority say that if the ban comes in, they'll stay home".
"How can I police a smoking ban with no staff? I can hardlyexpect Timmy [her partner\] to come down on his night off to watch people smoking."
She is not a member of any lobby group either. Would she go to jail for the pub? "Ah no." She's a pragmatist. "If the ban comes in, people will just have to find a way around it."
Meanwhile, in Killarney, the Kerry Vintners Association was nailing its colours to the mast in the shape of stark black print notices at pub entrances reading: "It was agreed by the Kerry Vintners to adopt CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE in relation to the proposed smoking ban. NO CO-OPERATION".
"What we've done is the most extreme measure we could take," says Paudie O'Callaghan, the 36-year-old chairman of Killarney Vintners Association. "I am not going to tell customers to leave my premises. We're in the hospitality industry. We should be in a position where people can frequent a pub like this and have smoking facilities provided."
"If the Minister would just compromise," says Danny Leane of the Abbey Inn in Tralee and PR for the Vintners' Federation of Ireland (VFI) in Co Kerry. "If he'd brought it in on Ash Wednesday for half the pub, maybe phase it in over six to 12 months for the rest, he'd have the support of the vintners. But he wouldn't even meet us . . . I'd go to jail for it, sure. Joe Higgins said he'd keep the bed warm for me."
Compromise usually means the division of pubs into smoking and non-smoking areas and a sudden interest in extractors. But Tralee GP, Dr David Buckley says most family-run rural pubs - the ones said to be most vulnerable - are too small for that to be practical.
In any event, Co Donegal has followed the Co Kerry call to disorder and according to O'Callaghan, other counties poised to follow suit include Cork, Mayo, Galway, Tipperary, Waterford and Longford - "and then you'll see it snowballing". A founding member of the IHIA (Irish Hospitality Industry Alliance) who also happens to be Jackie Healy-Rae's election agent, O'Callaghan is tipped to be one of the candidates the vintners are threatening to field in next year's local elections.
The move is in response to "the growing level of repressive legislation", says Joe Browne, president of the VFI.
Danny Leane says: "We have 10 Fianna Fáil councillors; nine were in favour of the ban." But he refuses to name the odd-man-out.
There appears to be more than one, however. In a week when the Taoiseach re-affirmed that there was no turning back and 18 trade unions, health charities and medical organisations, between them claiming to represent a million people, united in support of the ban, Co Kerry members of the Southern Health Board led a six-man revolt by voting against a motion supporting the ban.
The Co Kerry dissidents included two Fianna Fáil councillors, Michael Cahill, a publican, and Tom Fleming, a member of the Kerry Vintners' Association, who leases out his pub, as well as deputy Jackie Healy-Rae and his son, councillor Michael Healy-Rae. The latter pushed for the vote despite unanimous agreement last December to support the ban. The other two, from Co Cork, were Fianna Fáil councillor Kevin O'Keeffe and Fine Gael councillor Donal Harrington.
An editorial in the Kerryman newspaper was scathing, describing their actions as "the best advertisement yet for the abolition of the health boards . . . At least Fianna Fáil councillor in Galway, Val Hanley had the decency to resign as chairman of the Western Health Board, clashing as it did with his position with the Connacht Vintners Association".
As for democracy within the Kerry Vintners' Association, Paudie O'Callaghan claims the vintners' vote for civil disobedience was "countywide, unanimous, without any dissenting voice". However, several publicans around Tralee say they knew of no such vote. Of the 384 VFI members in the county (out of a total of about 400 pubs), 243 attended the meeting, according to Danny Leane.
Sinéad Roche was not at the meeting and is not actively opposed to the ban. A non-smoker who owns the James G. Ashe pub, restaurant and B & B in Dingle, she - like many in family-oriented tourist areas - is more exercised by the law banning under-18s from the premises after 9 p.m. "They obviously don't want French, German or Italian families coming to Ireland any more," she says.
As for the smoking ban, her "main gripe" relates to the policing of it. "How can I be held responsible? Am I supposed to tackle someone in that situation? And what do I do if it turns nasty? Call the police at one in the morning? If you take a jet to New York and you start smoking on the plane, the pilot doesn't get arrested; the smoker does. Why is this so different?"
But she can see the positive side. She believes it may stop some young people from starting to smoke. Also, "a lot" of her smoking customers have admitted they will welcome it because they believe it will help them stay off cigarettes. Dr David Buckley reports a similar reaction, "because most who give up \ go back on them after a few drinks".
In the absence of a bartenders' trade union in Co Kerry, it is hard to establish the degree of opposition or otherwise among bar staff. It would take a brave person - or one who no longer needed a job in the sector - to raise their head above the parapet in the current climate. The stock answer from publicans about staff attitudes is that most of the staff themselves smoke, as if this automatically confirms their opposition to the ban.
Yet random interviews in a dozen pubs around Co Kerry this week showed that two owners smoked, while five others had either given up or never smoked. Among staff members chosen at random in the other five pubs, four had either given up or never smoked and the fifth - a "social" smoker - supported the ban, as did three of the others.
The chairman of the 30-strong Killarney Bartenders' Association, Bernie O'Brien - who kicked the habit a year ago and knows four or five others who have done likewise - admits, surprisingly, that there has been no meeting of his association on the issue.
Personally, he opposes the ban, on the basis that "smoking is a part of our life". Would he go to jail for it? "Jaze . . . I don't know about that."
Today, the vintners will launch a protest at the Fianna Fáil Ardfheis in Killarney, while trying to distance themselves from "the anti-war crowd". They're talking the talk, promising to walk the walk, but quietly, most of them concede that nothing will stop the ban now.
Forget the bar staff. It's the politicians on the canvass next summer that you have to feel sorry for . . .