GERMANY:German smokers are putting up the kind of resistance to the country's new ban that was expected - but never materialised - in Ireland nearly four years ago.
A constitutional challenge has already been filed, while bar owners hope to get around the new law by transforming their pubs into member-only clubs.
One pocket of resistance is the "Heide 11" pub in Berlin, where a sign reads: "We're still smoking". Yesterday morning, they still were. Visitors ring a newly installed bell to get in and collect a card promising "free membership for the duration of your stay".
"Most of my customers are pensioners and I can't put them out on the street for a cigarette," said owner Barbara Palm, taking a drag from her own cigarette.
"Society made me a smoker - I started back in the day when it was fashionable. I'd like to quit but I can't, and I won't have society telling me what I can and cannot do in my own bar, in my own lungs."
Rather than follow the Irish example and ban smoking in workplaces, German lawmakers tortured themselves for months over the wording of their legislation. Should smoking be banned in restaurants as well as pubs? What about pubs serving food? Is a bockwurst food?
Marianne Dietze from Schwerin is one of many pub-owners openly flouting the ban and risking a €1,000 fine.
"What the government's trying to push through isn't democratic," she said. "It's a dictatorship." Strong words, but not without foundation.
Germany's first smoking bans were introduced in the Nazi era, when smoking was portrayed in propaganda as the despicable habit of "Jews, jazz musicians, communists, capitalists, intellectuals and homosexuals".
That all ended when the US army arrived in 1945, flooding the country with Lucky Strikes and making cigarettes post-war Germany's currency of choice.
Back in the "Heide 11", Palm's customers are clearly enjoying their defiance. "Three of us here smoke, three don't," said one, "but we all want to be here, we get along just grand."