An Irishman's Diary

Is there any real civil liberties lobby in Ireland at all? Do many people think that the State should not automatically have …

Is there any real civil liberties lobby in Ireland at all? Do many people think that the State should not automatically have the right to decide whether or not people enter a pub at three in the morning or to enjoy a cigarette there, asks Kevin Myers

Or does everyone assume that the State may appropriate to itself whatever powers it wants and may confiscate from the citizens rights which should be inalienable? It certainly seems that way.

The Minister for Health Micheál Martin wants to ban smoking from all pubs. Everyone knows the arguments for this and frankly, I detest cigarette smoke so much I am inclined to sympathise with him: cigarette smoke has made a great many pubs simply unbearable.

But the balance in the Minister's new Bill has gone too far in the opposite direction.

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This isn't to support Noel Davern's ridiculous proposal to limit cigarette smoking to one third of the floor space. Smoke doesn't occupy floor space. It occupies air and air moves. But of course, Noel Davern knows this full well.

So we should watch him closely, for he is a very slippery customer indeed and one of the most effective representatives of that extraordinarily powerful lobby group, the publicans.

Perhaps the Minister might remember what Noel Davern did early one morning to the Restaurant Licensing Bill in the 1980s, while most of the Dáil were snoring in their beds.

The publicans of Ireland, being a greedy shower of bastards, were vehemently opposed to allowing restaurants to have full drinks licences. Acting as their envoy, he slipped in various amendments to the Bill in the dead of night.

These stipulated that for a restaurant to have a full licence, it had to have a waiting area one third the size of the dining area, it had to have so many WCs in proportion to dining places, it had to possess a runway on which a fully laden B-52 could take off and a swimming pool with albino crocodiles and its waiting staff must be lesbian Aztecs called Pearl.

The result was that it was simply too expensive for most restaurants to get a full licence; the night-time commando legal raid by the publicans' proxy was a military triumph.

So Micheál, my boy, watch your Bill, very carefully indeed.

Blink for a moment and you'll find that slippery taverner called Daverner sneaking into the Dáil and adding in little amendments at 2 a.m., such as the new anti-smoking law only applies on February 30th or during months containing the letters F, K and Q. And no one will even notice these little details until they're the law.

But there is another point here and it is one of principle. Is it wrong for smokers to choose to gather in a pub to drink and smoke? Have they not got the fundamental right to endanger their health in the manner they want?

So should premises not be licensed to permit smoking, where free adults might do with their bodies what they want? Of course, the freedoms of vehement anti-smokers (such as myself) are currently being violated by the present laissez- faire attitude towards smoking.

We have a fundamental right to expect that the air that we breathe is not being contaminated by burning tobacco. So the licence to permit a pub in which the air is contaminated by smokers should come at a high price.

Perhaps as Minister you might invoke the precedent established by the publicans 15 years ago, when a restaurant was charged £15,000 to acquire a full-bar licence.

The equivalent today for a smoking licence should be perhaps £50,000, with annual inspections to ensure that the publicans are obeying whatever nasty stipulations you see fit.

But of course, your anti- smoking law will mean absolutely nothing unless it is enforced.

Public drunkenness is one the most appalling features of Irish life today and all the necessary laws are present for it to be stamped out. It is illegal to serve a drunk: it is illegal to be drunk in public. Yet neither law is enforced in any meaningful way - and meaningful means that publicans would invariably lose their licences for serving drunks and under-age drinkers

One of the most lauded bills of recent years was the plastic bags tax. It has certainly driven plastic bags from our countryside: but since it is not enforced by an inspectorate, exactly what this column predicted at the time has occurred.

Shopkeepers from the Republic are buying huge numbers of plastic bags from cash- and-carry wholesalers in the North and are charging the plastic bag "tax" on them in their shops, which of course they are then pocketing.

This is fraud, being perpetrated on a vast scale on the people of the Republic. And of course, nothing is being done about it.

Minister, as you might have noticed in your shrewder moments, this is not Scandinavia. Without a system of enforcement, people will continue to smoke in pubs, either because the publican ignores them or because they will bully him into compliance.

And unless he can show that the State will enforce the law, then that law will have precisely the power of all those others laws against public drunkenness, under-age drinking, littering and illegal dumping, all of which have been studiously ignored down the years.

We know that the morality police of An Garda Síochána are far too busy raiding massage parlours and lap-dancing clubs to enforce any other law: so who will enforce your anti- smoking law? Remember the risible dog-muzzling law? Will your smoke-muzzling law go the same way?