THE news that there was another top on cigarettes was met with some pleasure in the pub. "They'll find it," one man nod sagely. "Don't cry for the smokers they'll find the money."
Of course they will, didn't we all?
It's an addiction and what else can you do except find it?
Once, when there was a savage hike in the cost of them, I tried rolling my own not a successful experiment. I set fire to my face about three times and was covered in loose tobacco and bits of spat out paper. So it was a matter of going back to the real thing and paying for it by sending less post cards, making less phone calls and taking no taxis at all.
I wouldn't actually have killed for a cigarette, and I wasn't forced to go on the game to feed the nicotine habit, but I couldn't sleep if I didn't think I had one for the morning and I used to borrow 5p from strangers with no embarrassment in order to make up the price of the pack something. I have to say proudly, I never did for a gin and tonic.
So is it a good thing to tax addictions? You're fairly sure of getting your money, which is what a Budget is about but it may increase the number of cartons stolen or hijacked, it may encourage greedy airport authorities to spend millions building further Duty Free Emporioms to house mega quantities of smokes.
No one would claim that there's a real welfare element in it who do you know that gave up smoking for money? Where is the money smokers saved, even if they smoked four packs a day? Anyone who smoked that much spends Pounds 10 a day, Pounds 70 a week, nearly three and a half thousand pounds a year. But have you ever been in someone's house where they said "Look at the grand kitchen we built with the money we saved by giving up smoking"? Or do they go on a huge holiday or endow a scholarship or have cosmetic surgery? Like heck they do, as the much missed Bet from Coronation Street would have said.
There is no money to save. It's not real money, it's money you have to find when you're desperate to inhale and get some short term peace and relaxation.
ANYONE I know who gave up cigarettes was not remotely influenced by a Minister for Finance or a Chancellor of the Exchequer. It came about because of a pain in the chest, a statistic too many, a cough that scattered people, the seediness of ashtrays and eventually the growing unacceptability of it in normal society.
The man in the pub was right smokers will find the extra 10p. If I were still a smoker and I was pushed for funds I'd still find the money somehow. Twenty years ago, when I found that my own budget was not balancing at all, a kind and fiscally sound friend went through it all with me, item by item, and told me sadly that four packs a day seemed to be playing a significant part in the expenditure. I just got another job. I took on an astrology column for a magazine, which made up the shortfall.
So the people who give up smoking this week because of the 10p will be few. And there's no point in trying to convince the rest by exclaiming over the price of what they are puffing up into the air. If they smoke at Pounds 2.78, they'll smoke at Pounds 2.88. And the man in the pub said that they'd smoke at a fiver a packet as he buried his face in a pint which, he said fair play to the man Quinn hadn't been tampered with at all, price wise.
But the hope is that it might actually help in the effort to stop young people starting smoking.
If you are very young and have little real access to any money, then the dearer the things are, the stronger the possibility that they might become out of sight like caviar or something.
ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) was pleased to see the price rise and issued a press release within minutes of its being announced. They said that while they welcomed it as progressive, it was not sufficiently strong to make a real impact on young people smoking and that since Ireland has the youngest population in Europe every action should be taken to prevent young people taking up the habit.
AND they should know, since they have several schemes targeting the young in operation at the moment. One is called SCRAP, a handy title for the more cumbersome Smoking Cessation Reduction Programme and that is directed at children in the 12-13 age group. Everyone is in on this act the Department of Health, the Irish Cancer Society, the National Youth Federation and the Department of Education. Ah, you might say, 12 and 13 year olds, they're a bit young surely?
Young? You ain't heard nothing yet. These are often the confirmed smokers. ASH's other programme is called Smoke busters and that is directed at children age 7 to 11. And this is considered by everyone who knows to be a highly intelligent idea and badly needed.
They also have the "I Have to say No Campaign" which is another attempt to frustrate the young would be smoker. ASH does not believe that all retailers are greedy monsters forcing nicotine down into the lungs of kids to make a profit, but it's often hard for a shopkeeper to refuse a child who says that the packet is for his granny.
The leaflet which they can now give the children to take home has a picture of a cigarette and the word No, plus an explanation that the law says it is illegal to sell them to anyone under the age of 16.
There are a few irate grannies and parents around who really did send a child out for fags, and of course every shop knows that if children don't buy them here, they'll get them in the next place.
Imagine if you could think of something that would really really work Something that wasn't just a bunch of reformed addicts like myself choking rather publicly and opening windows. Something that was more meaningful to the young than the terrifying figures children don't think about pensions and blocked arteries and clogged lungs.
Something that made it clever not to smoke and better still not even to start. What is the answer to "How do you know if you never tried it"?
Wouldn't it be as good as inventing penicillin or writing a symphony if you could think of something that would stop young people starting to smoke?