BACK IN 1971 smokers ruled the world or, at least, had managed to insist on their rights above those of non-smokers. The Irish TimesEducation Correspondent, John Horgan, took time off from the annual teachers' conferences to write a cri de coeur (or, perhaps, cri de poumon) in support of the widely overlooked rights of non-smokers.
NON-SMOKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE – EVEN IF IT MEANS LOSING YOUR FRIENDS
Non-smokers of the world are becoming a little peeved, to say the least of it, at all the angst that is being expended about the plight of the world’s smokers – the poor, threatened people that they are.
The brutal fact of the matter, of course, is that whereas the smoker can always give up his vice, the non-smoker never can. People who smoke groan often enough about the ways in which the Government discriminates against them – but have they ever paused to consider the plight of their non-smoking brethren?
There are few more pleasant ways to start a morning for instance than a sharp sprint along the pavement to the bus stop – an exercise which fills the lungs with deep draughts of fresh air. (The smoker is, for the most part, incapable even of this.) The problem is that if the lower deck of the bus is full, the unfortunate traveller is forced to climb the stairs into a reeking inferno full of rheumy-eyed citizens hawking, spitting, coughing and exhaling vast quantities of acrid smoke.
The non-smoker, if he is to get to work on time, has literally no alternative but to suffer in silence. If he is in the habit of breathing deeply, he probably ends up by inhaling more smoke than any of his fellow-passengers who actually have the smouldering vegetation between their lips.
It seems to be a pity that we can’t ban smoking on buses altogether. But until we do it might be a good idea to make the upper deck the non-smoking compartment, which is usually filled last, so that the onus would be on the smokers to curb their filthy habits.
The same attitude, regrettably, is true of most public places. It is becoming increasingly impossible to spend more than an hour in a restaurant or a cinema, for instance, without your eyes smarting from the smog. The non-smoker here is in much the same position as the cyclist who finds that whatever direction he takes, the wind is always against him.
Wherever the non-smoker sits in public, the tang of cigarette smoke will unerringly find its way to his nostrils.
Attempts are made from time to time to redress the balance, but unavailingly. Try suggesting to your companions on a crowded railway train that the “No Smoking” sign on your compartment actually means what it says, and you run the risk of instant defenestration. The ticket collectors don’t seem to care. Here, as everywhere else, it is the non-smoker who is the oddity, the social outcast – not the arch-fumigator, who deserves to be.
The principal reason why non-smokers will always be discriminated against, of course, is that public facilities are so often divided up on the “equal time” principle – in other words, that facilities should be provided to smokers and non-smokers in roughly equal proportions.
The fallacies inherent in this kind of reason should be obvious to anybody with a brain in his head.
The greatest public relations coup the smoking fraternity has ever pulled is to persuade the world that they have a problem. They haven’t got a problem, we have. It’s them.
To read any of the items in The Irish Timesof April 14th, 1971, go to www.irishtimes.com/150
To view the above article, click on: