All that the debate on the proposed ban on smoking in pubs needed was the intervention of some expert from the US with "figures" to win the day. And now, finally, he has emerged, with "statistics" which within no time at all will become facts.
Jim Repace is - yes - a second-hand smoke consultant. What a career. Is he just a second-hand smoke consultant because he hasn't managed to get a job at a new smoke consultant's offices, so for the moment he's hanging round the used-smoke consultancy, waiting for his big break? You can't beat the new-smoke business: no kicking of tyres, or checking the big end. Three-year warranty, parts and labour, and none of the hassle of the exhaust falling off as the customer drives off the forecourt.
This splendid gentleman declared the other day that 150 bar staff a year in Ireland were killed by passive smoking ( "premature deaths": same thing). But he doesn't know this to be so. However, the figure does sound good: and if we are going to have an utterly fatuous debate on smoking in bars, we might as well have a second-hand smoke expert presenting what are purely hypothetical figures almost as scientifically proven facts.
Even so, the anti-smoking zealots probably feel a little bit let down. Why did he stop at 150 bar staff a year? Why not 5,000, or 100,000? And why didn't he blame second-hand smoke for the Second Battle of Ypres and Stalingrad? And has he not developed any riveting theories connecting used smoke with the curse of Tutankhamun, the Fall of the Roman Empire and the Black Death?
The truth is that are no known facts for how many bar-staff die from inhaling other people's cigarette-smoke. None. My suspicion is that the number who do is nearly the same: none, or almost none.
However, smoking-related lung cancer has now been blessed by the same magic wand which made AIDS a fashionable disease to which we were all equally at risk, even when we weren't.
The AIDS industry told us lies in the 1980s, declaring that AIDS was sweeping through the entire population, and that we would all be dead by 2003, and would the last person standing please make sure he put the cemetery shovel back in the shed before going for a long swim.
We now know that the general AIDS scare was all my eye and Betty Martin - pure hokum; and it remains so to this day. So the panic specialists have moved on to smoking to scare the living daylights out of us, meanwhile arousing the governess instincts which are such a powerful feature of Irish life.
The central issue about cigarette smoking is freedom. It's irrelevant whether or not it shortens your life-span, which is the argument some supporters of the smoking ban adduce to justify the Minister's measure. Drinking two bottles of brandy every day, or having anal sex with hundreds of strangers a year can also be fatal. We have no law outlawing either activity.
Do I have the right to sit in a pub free of cigarette smoke? Yes, I have. Do I have the right to sit in a pub and smoke, and inhale other people's smoke, if I want to? Yes, I have. It is a matter of freedom of choice; and choice is what is not being provided at the moment, and nor will it be provided by the new Bill.
One of the more perplexing arguments in favour of the Bill came from Kathy Sheridan in this newspaper: it seemed to be on the lines that the right to smoke was the same as the right to call people "niggers". But that is the very argument that vindicates the rights of people to smoke in certain places, with consenting adults.
I have the right to use the word "nigger" in my house, with people who are not insulted by it; but I have no right whatever to use it in circumstances where it might cause offence. And though I'm delighted to see that vigorous steps are being taken against racist expressions in public, it remains a right of mine to be racist in private; just as it is the right of an African to loathe me for my race, but not to do or say anything about it where it might cause offence.
There is a way round the smoking impasse, provided we don't depend on either second-hand experts with their strange hypotheses or the vintners' equally fatuous warnings that 60,000 jobs would be lost if the smoking ban were introduced. Here is the way. Have the majority population of non-smokers the right to smoke-free pubs? Yes. Have we got those now? No.
Vintners' suggestions that part of a bar should be smoke-free are either stupid or disingenuous: not even a Kerry publican would maintain he could persuade smoke to stay in one place. Technical arguments about ventilation are equally disingenuous.
The answer is simple. Certain pubs should be licensed - and at a high cost - to allow smoking. Most pubs should not have such a licence. And if an unlicensed publican does allow smoking, he'll be. . .
He'll be what? Who will inspect? Who will enforce? Who will prosecute? In other words, here we go again: another meaningless law sitting on the meaningless-law stocks of the Dáil shipyard.
And so, as the champagne smashes against the ban's bows, the voice of the State invokes benedictions upon compliant and non-compliant alike: may God bless this law and all who fail in it.