YOU CAN’T always extrapolate from the Irish Republic to Britain. There are radical differences: a far smaller population, more intimate communities, a wholly different experience of history.
All the same, it comes as a shock when this sister nation across the Irish Sea does something sudden, decisive, successful and bold: the kind of thing we dicker about for years on end. It is like the tortoise and the hare — they lounge around apparently set in old ways, far behind us; then, without warning old Ireland gets up, yawns, shakes her skirts and streaks past us to yet another finishing post. On holiday here among old friends of 30 or 40 years’ acquaintance, watching them ride the wave of change with apparent insouciance we blink and rub our eyes in amazement and admiration.
It happened with the euro: well within my own memory as a teenage barmaid here, this was a country so quaintly old-fashioned that when the great Sixties bank strike was on, it reverted to a pre-industrial revolution system of scribbled IOUs on envelopes and community pools of small change. The incidence of fraud, it was later calculated, was negligible. People just sauntered backwards into a less sophisticated era, and got on with life. Yet a blink of an eye later, offered the opportunity to join a vast pan-European currency, Ireland did the deed almost casually and nobody seems to give a backward glance. It’s only money, only a symbol: far more attention is paid to the realities of life — the price of food, the social inequalities brought on by the country’s uneven economic surge, the crack and the gossip of daily life.
But far more startling is the latest Irish change. I address you from the corner of a small, snug bar in a small, snug town, way out West on the Atlantic shore. With the chatter, the crowded shelves and optics, the nutty smell of porter and fruity tang of whiskey and the constant passing to and fro of townspeople and tourists in the narrow room, it could be any of the bars I have frequented in 40 years of coming here. It could be the one I worked in for four student summers, pulling pints and hauling crates and decanting whiskey from wicker-covered flagons. It could be the late Tommy Newman’s, or Jenny Donovan’s (which had a fine ice-cream freezer in the corner) or any of a dozen others. Except that it couldn’t: something is different. It takes a while to realise what.
Six months ago the Irish Government introduced a ban on smoking in workplaces, including bars, pubs and restaurants. So there is no smoke. Nobody is smoking indoors at all. No fags, no pipes, nothing. There is a place out the back where a cigarette may be taken, but few seem to bother. It is not worth giving up a pole-position barstool for. This pub smells only of the fruity fumes of drink and the warm fug of huddled humanity, in from the damp evening. Eyes do not sting, clothes do not reek as you leave. For a sociable non-smoker it is Nirvana, Eden without the serpent. For a smoker — well, you would think it would be torment, a violent uprooting of a lifetime’s habit. You would expect rebellious muttering, a nervous patting of hands on pockets for the missing cigarette, a street full of surly, alienated smokers with their hoods up, puffing furiously.
It isn’t happening. Nobody seems to mind much. Barring a few high-profile breaches, there is a reported 97 per cent “compliance” across all workplaces, including bars. Moreover, people do not seem to be dashing home to light up: Irish cigarette sales fell nationally by 16 per cent in the first six months of this year, and the latest survey shows that, for the first time since records began, fewer than one in four people in Ireland smoke.
It is barely 15 years ago, when Stansted was still an eerily quiet airport, that you could invariably spot the Ryanair passengers to Cork by the cumulus cloud of blue smoke that hung over them. Drink and tobacco were equally rooted in the culture and the songs. (“... All for me beer and tobacco” ... “No pipe I’ll smoke and no horse I’ll yoke until I wed the star of the County Down”.) But now tobacco has been uprooted. The ban on workplace smoking was well trailed; services offering help to quit have seen a surge in clientele. The effect is helped by a slashing rise in the tobacco tax (and the Exchequer in Dublin seems sanguine about the probably loss of 60 million euros in revenue in the first half-year).
If the figures are interesting — and they are parallelled in New York, with its similar ban — it is the human response behind them that is even more so. It indicates that low-level addictions are perhaps more breakable than we think. Flick away one domino and the rest fall. As I look around now, I can see people who a year ago would definitely have had a cigarette going, its smoke curling comfortably up to the well-kippered ceiling, part of the relaxation of an evening out. “Sometimes,” one said, “you’d hardly take a drag at it, even. It was just for having it lit.” Now they can’t light up unless they go out into the damp, or some tent arrangement, so they don’t bother. Meanwhile, propaganda and fashion and advice for quitters and the dwindling number of fellow smokers all contribute to a sense that it probably isn’t worth buying that next — expensive — packet at all. Can’t smoke at work, can’t smoke in the pub, feel guilty about smoking at home around your kids? Give up.
I have to admit that to me, much of this is bewilderingly counter-intuitive. I have always been a libertarian non-smoker. I hate the smell and find ashtrays depressing; when I was a barmaid they were the worst part of the job. Yet you can hate the smoke and understand the smoker: my father was a heavy user of cigarettes and cigarillos, and I was always aware that he grew up in a culture where smoking was not only normal but sophisticated, the mark of a gentleman with savoir-faire. The old films made that quite clear; Bette Davis, Cary Grant, Robert Mitchum, Rita Hayworth, all of them elegantly wreathed in blue smoke, their ash glowing in the romantic dusk. He told me not to smoke, and offered a £100 bribe if I reached 21 without getting the habit; but for him it was integral to his life, apparently part of his very identity. Later, in the days of the old Punch Table, I would return home on a Friday once a month with my clothes reeking horribly of cigar and my ears ringing with top-grade jokes and gossip from that once legendary magazine, and accept that these things went together. To this day you often find the smoking room at media parties is the place to be, as a generation hangs on to its habit and makes the best and wickedest cracks through a toxic blue haze.
So I have never campaigned for a ban. For another thing, I have always believed that the State should concentrate on fixing the trains and the drains and catching proper criminals, and that it is for the free citizen to determine how many cigars, burgers or chocolate cakes constitute an acceptable level of self-abuse. And pragmatically, I hate the tendency of governments to slap down laws which will be routinely broken. For instance, there are already heavy penalties enforceable on those who serve more drink to the drunk, and these are seldom if ever called upon despite the weekend chaos of our city centres. Why make the law a fool, just to let the Home Secretary of the day feel macho?
But, as I say, my conviction cracks as I sit in the smokeless, yet still affable and unmistakable atmosphere of an Irish rural bar. It could be that we libertarians are wrong. It could be that sometimes a firm shove from the law is all that is needed to achieve a benign change in millions of lives. Maybe it is just a matter of timing it right, sensing the moment, and combining carrot and stick in the proper proportions (the carrot, in this case, being not having to pay the tax hike). Maybe it is easier to achieve in a country with a small population, or a city-state such as New York. Perhaps we have not reached the same point in Britain, and it won’t work as well. But it might. If so, Gordon Brown had better brace himself for a drop in revenue.
Join the Debate at comment@thetimes.co.uk
