Have we gone off our collective trolleys? Two pub owners, Ronan Lawless and Kieran Levanzin, were fined on Monday a total of €6,400, coverning a range of offences, with another €3,000 in costs, for smoking on their premises and allowing others to do likewise. That's not a large fine; that's a whopping, state-of-the-art, come here Mr Bourke and let me feel your collar kind of a fine, writes Kevin Myers.
What were these two reprobates doing? Engaging in an activity which is legal at home, in hotel rooms, and in bars across the EU - and indeed, the entire world. True, in Afghanistan they wouldn't have fined the lads for smoking but would have shot them for selling alcohol. Also, Basra.
But they were not convicted and found guilty of behaving as Sharon Shannon was, of being three times over the drink limit when her car slammed into a parked vehicle just over a year ago. Her defence was that she was not driving at the time. Before convicting her, Judge Mary Fahy said the accused and her friends had told blatant and outright lies to the court, fining her €800, and disqualifying her from driving for two years. However, Sharon Shannon successfully appealed because the application to issue the summons was one day outside the six-month limit. And her counsel did say she had a full defence.
(A brief interpolation here before we return to the main thrust of this column. Who was responsible for yet another failure to activate a summons on time? Why always the magically narrow margin of failure? And to what lofty rank has the wretch since been promoted? For I take it from the frequency with which this sort of thing occurs that promotion is the usual outcome for such ineptitude, stupidity or malfeasance. If demotion or dismissal were the certain result, it would surely never happen.)
But back to the first Shannon trial. Here we have a judge who was sure she was being lied to by a defendant facing a terribly serious charge. If the accused was driving - and Judge Fahy thought she was - in her extremely drunken condition, it was by luck alone that she killed no one when her car crashed. Yet she was fined a mere €800. Admittedly, she lost her licence for two years as well, but she can probably afford a driver.
On the other hand, a court this week in effect fined two men nearly €5,000 each for merely smoking cigarettes on their own premises. Well, you might say, two different judges work in quite different ways - which would be a fair point if there were two different judges, but there weren't. There was the one. Judge Mary Fahy.
All, right, we've established that in terms of financial penalties, it is (effectively) six times more serious for two consenting adults to smoke in their own pub than it is (theoretically) for an adult to become almost leglessly drunk in that same pub, get into a car, smash into another car, and then lie through her teeth about the entire affair in court. Smoking kills, et cetera. Of course it does - but not as swiftly and as certainly as drunk drivers.
But the State now has a policy to eliminate smoking. Which is good. So what happened to the owner of a Cavan garage which sold cigarettes to a 13-year-old girl? Well, Thomas Cassidy was fined €250 for selling a tobacco product to an under-age girl, and also ordered to pay €500 costs. We'll call it a €750 fine - about one seventh of the monstrous fine inflicted on each of our two publicans.
Maybe the fine was so small because he was contrite and apologetic about his deeds? Well, when accused of selling cigarettes to the 13-year old, he replied: "I have no intention of ever complying with the health board. Business is business and that's how I run mine. . .I don't care if I'm caught. I will have no problem paying the f---ing fines anyway." This time the judge was not Mary Fahy but Judge David Maughan.
One of the recent catch-cries of recent years is how liberal and tolerant we have become, compared with the bigoted, Catholic-dominated Ireland that we left behind. Remember how condoms were banned by law? Remember the intrepid Dublin garda in 1991 who bought a condom from Virgin Megastore? He then prosecuted the shop and it was fined £400. It appealed, of course - and the appeal judge, a creature called O'Hanrahan - increased the fine to £500, observing that he was letting Virgin off lightly. As the law stood, each further condom sale could lead to a £5,000 fine, with an additional fine of £250 for each single day condoms remained on sale, with possible imprisonment for the evil wrongdoers as well. The author of this law was that legendarily ascetic celibate, Charles Haughey.
Plus ça change. Condoms one year; smoking in pubs another. We have exchanged one busybody, intolerant orthodoxy for another, meanwhile allowing grotesque anomalies - the drunk-driver, the man who boastfully sells cigarettes to minors - to slip by relatively unpunished. We are using law not to protect the rights of adults to make adult decisions about their lives, but to erect legal totems, before which we prostrate ourselves, in the belief that we are morally superior to other people. But we're actually making asses of ourselves.
Footnotes: (a) I detest cigarette smoke. (b) The ban will prove unworkable this winter, and pubs will covertly allocate rooms to smokers, just as supermarkets everywhere are now covertly giving people plastic bags.