Ireland Butts Out

By Dave Abbott

Unthinkable as it seems, it’s last call for smokers in Ireland’s pubs. The country is preparing to be the first EU member to ban smoking in public places. The pubs of Dublin with fiddles, music, Guinness and cigarette smoke (gasp) will likely never be the same. 

The controversial legislation, driven partly by political correctness, common sense, and alarming death rates (+7,000 every year), is dictating the end of "the pint and fag" era, a distinctive feature of Irish pubs. To the politically attuned and traveled sophisticates of Dublin, it’s time to get in step with progressive smokeless America. 

The move, as you can imagine, has a wide range of opponents. The workingman is apoplectic. Rural farmers are preparing a counter-offensive. The young are too pissed to notice. And no one has told the pensioners — who are dying of heart and lung disease anyway — the news. 

Sir. Francis Drake is credited with introducing tobacco to the British Isles, a "weed" that the Irish, with their propensity for excess and addiction, readily adopted. When tobacco companies introduced the cheap "Woodbine" cigarette, made from factory floor leftovers and smelling like dry cow dung, smoking became affordable. 

And in a country with a climate where tuberculosis and bronchitis once flourished, smoking increased the likelihood of pulmonary disease and early death. 

My introduction to fags was courtesy of Pascal Ayres, a quiet and cheerful young man of 16, who gave me my first cigarette and introduced my lungs to nicotine. It was traumatic. After just a couple of puffs, I puked all over the historic Martello Tower in Sandycove, the one made famous by James Joyce being a resident. 

Pascal really should have known better. He was four years older me. I was a mere child easily seduced by an opportunity to flaunt authority. But, even as I was throwing up, Pascal was encouraging me to smoke another. "Try another one – ‘twill make yeh better’ he pleaded sincerely. And being, literally, a little green around the gills I did as instructed, coughing, spitting, making icky vomiting sounds, ‘argh, ugh, wheqette, yuck." 

I think it did taste better. The smell had a pleasing Virginian bouquet. And besides, the Imperial Tobacco packet itself was interesting with its picture of John Player, himself dressed in a jaunty sailor hat, on the front of the package. He may have winked at me. I can’t be sure. In the vernacular of the time, it was ‘gameball!’ I figured I was pretty grown up. Goodbye childhood! Hello manhood! 

Smoking was cool. Pretty well most family members smoked. Bogie and Bacall did it. And when Marlene Dietrich puffed on a fag dressed in a slinky gown, a young man’s libido rose upwards faster than the smoke from her cigarette. 

Smoking at the movies and on buses or trains, until a few years ago, was deemed perfectly acceptable. Irish workers refused to huddle outside office buildings freezing their butts off while smoking their butts. They smoke in their office or canteen. A rainy night ride on a Dublin double-decker bus — a mix of steam, cigarette smoke and condensation — made every passenger potentially ulcerous and tubercular.

It’s also true that most pubs in Europe are smoke-filled choking cesspools of nicotine bon-bons. Walking from the fresh air into one makes even the hardiest smokers gasp and cough. The walls, lighting fixtures and ceilings are usually stained shades of brown and yellow, like faux Italian terra cotta. By closing time, the pubs are smoldering landfills of ashes and butts turning the air foul with the smell of stale tobacco smoke, Guinness stout and whiskey fumes. Smoking upsets sensitive North American stomachs so the chances are the ban will please the tourists from the pristine smoke-free Excited States of America and Canada, eh! 

But, the same cannot be said of the natives who are a rebellious lot. Dubliners do not like being told what to do. The Irish psyche and culture resents State authority. So, a law prohibiting smoking is one thing, making it stick is another? And in rural areas where the pubs are tiny, and the roots between publican and patron run deeper, that will be entirely another matter! 

Imagine a village with two pubs, each the size of a small room, maybe with a fireplace. 

It’s been like that for more than 50 years. Here the farmers gather after parking their tractors outside. It’s here they have their first pint of the evening, smoke their pipes and blather away. Is there a landlord brave, or foolhardy, enough to tell them, "Go outside and smoke?" 

Two hundred publicans in Co. Kerry have already announced they will ignore the new law. Historians will tell you Kerrymen were in the thick of Ireland’s fight for Independence. They relish a good battle!

This may be just simple rhetoric at the start of a long fight but it could be the beginning of a Government nightmare. Watching the pub smokers of Ireland kick the nicotine habit will be nearly as painful as abstinence itself. But in the end every publican might as well get a sign that says: "No Smoking. Amen."
 
 

Ex-Irelander Dave Abbott is a journalist based in Vancouver. He can be reached at abbott@telus.net.