Clearing the Air in Dublin

By Richard Delevan

UNUSUALLY, Monday was a clear night all over Ireland. Not outside, of course, but in.

Walking from pub to pub in Dublin city center, I wanted to check out how the world’s first nationwide smoking ban was playing out.

Since Health Minister Micheal Martin announced it, there have been wars and rumors of wars over the smoking ban. Thousands of jobs would go in hotels and restaurants. 

The German or Belgian or Spanish or French tourists – whom Tourism Ireland prefers these days over the fickle, terrorism-shy Yanks – would turn up their noses and spark their unfiltered Gauloise fags in more smoker-friendly climes. (Bunch of cheese-eating surrender monkeys anyway – good riddance, says I.)

Publicans threatened lawsuits after exemptions were given. To nursing homes. To convents. To prisons, where guards can’t smoke but inmates can (hey – you try taking them away). 

To hotel rooms. Any place that might be plausibly described as a residence.

Publicans in Co. Kerry decided en masse to refuse to enforce the ban. Though there were no immediate reports of the army being called back from the Balkans to deal with the situation, defense officials are keeping a close eye on the Kingdom.

And who would enforce the ban? To cover a country only slightly smaller than Pennsylvania with tens of thousands of pubs and restaurants, just more than 40 inspectors had been hired by the health department. And they only would work 9 to 5 – though there were later reports that undercover “smoke spies” would take up the slack.

In a rather less funny development, the government also announced it was setting up a complaint line and encouraged people to inform on their local. It received calls less than 10 minutes after it went live at 8 a.m. Monday morning. What would Michael Collins say? Sheesh.

Walking across the Liffey, though, the world didn’t seem about to end.

Standing outside for the first time for a smoke in front of the new, swishy Grand Central Bar on O’Connell Street, two women who worked in a betting shop were enjoying the night air while their pints got warm.

“This crowd are taking the piss,” said the curvy blonde, Siobhan, referring not to the pub management but the government. 

“We can get fired for smoking ourselves outside the betting shop, but inside we’ve been told that we also have to tell the drunks, addicts and scumbags that they have to put theirs out? Then if they don’t, we could lose our jobs. And we’ve been told not to call the cops.”

There’s good reason for this. The police union, the Garda Representative Association, issued a statement less than a week before the ban went into effect, telling the politicians they were on their own. 

Around 20 Gardai (police) were on patrol on an average Saturday night, said their spokesman, and they had to deal with more serious crime. (It didn’t escape notice that a city of nearly 1 million people has its center policed by 20 unarmed rosy-cheeked kids from Roscommon. Quite reassuring. But a topic for another day.)

Gardai would only intervene if someone refused to leave a pub – or betting shop – when asked. And even that might take a while. In the meantime, they might lose their license.

Standing with the two betting shop girls was a bald, heavyset fella I at first mistook for the bouncer, Chris from Drumcondra – the home neighborhood of Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern.

“It’s got a wisp of fascism about it,” he said. “They’re going to go after the drink itself next.”

He took a last drag of his cigarette, then looked around and chuckled bitterly. “And how’s this for fun? There’s nowhere to put the thing out, no ashtray outside. But if I just grind it under my foot, I can get a Œ125 fine.”

Dublin City Council had passed the cigarette-litter ordinance a few months ago, and handed out a few dozen “pocket ashtrays” as a promotion when the litter fines came into effect, planning to sell them for a few euros each out of libraries and local government offices. I have never, ever, seen someone carrying one.

Ireland seems a strange place to take this giant leap into the future. It hardly needs saying that pubs have for centuries been the focal point for social, cultural and even political life in the country – a tradition handed down to tavern-keeper aldermen in Chicago, publican ward bosses in New York and rum-running ancestors of a future president in Boston. Only in Ireland, politicians still hold their constituency clinics in smoky bar rooms.

From baptism to courtship to marriage to wake, the pub was there. And so was the smoke.

So when the publicans have wanted something, they’ve generally gotten it over the decades. And when they opposed something, it didn’t happen. So not only is the ban going to affect day-to-day life, it’s a sign of some larger shift as well.

Flushed with his victory, in fact, ban architect Micheal Martin has announced he plans to go after drinking next. And he’s being touted as a potential future taoiseach and as that rarest of things in Ireland, A Man Who Gets Things Done.

After touring a few more spots – from Bowe’s near Trinity College where you’ll find a few Irish Times dandies sipping sherry (pro-ban) to the Oval Bar on Abbey Street where the straight-talking Independent hacks (generally anti-ban) are skulling as many pints as God (well, Tony O’Reilly) sends – it was clear. The air. 

And the fact that despite the fevered dreamings of die-hard smokers, there was a general acceptance that what’s done is done, and we’re better off for it. No civil disobedience planned.

There were a few infractions. One forgetful reporter I know walked into the Oval, lit cigarette in mouth, only to be met with a scream of “get out!” from manager Declan Glynn. 

He scampered out, stomped it out, and sheepishly slunk back inside for his pint. But Declan later told me it was the only such correction he had to make.

Another barman at TP Smyth’s told me that two Russian guys had entered the place with lit cigarettes, getting as far as the copper-covered spiral staircase before being turned back. They were new in town. And perhaps a bit surprised to find the Irish actually enforcing a law.

I then wandered down to my preferred watering hole, Kiely’s of Abbey Street. I sat down on my preferred stool and ordered my preferred drink. 

After a sip my fingers felt odd. A ghostly itch from an absent, smoldering digit.

Then I noticed something else was missing. Not just the smoke. The people. All of them. It was 10 o’clock at night, and over 3,000 square feet of empty space.

Manager Paul Barry was distraught when he found me there. “It’s the worst financial day since we opened. I’m down 75% on last Monday.” 

He took me around to the pub’s three sections (it’s a big place), and not a single customer in them. Just nervous-looking staff.

I looked around at the barmen and staff, busying themselves with cleaning, trying a bit too hard to look busy, and wondered how long it would be before some of them – who have nursed me through broken hearts, job loss and who I’ve invited to my wedding reception – are going to lose their jobs.

The reason the logic of a smoking ban became irresistible, of course, was for their sake. Logically, if second-hand smoke is harmful (and of course it is); and if people – particularly those for whom the labor market isn’t so free (e.g. pub and restaurant jobs are the number one occupation for single mothers) – shouldn’t be exposed to harm as a condition of employment (they shouldn’t); then it clearly follows that smoking had to be banned in pubs.

“It’s not the worst,” said one of them. “At least my clothes won’t smell of smoke when I go home.”

Whoever thought you could miss the smell? I wonder, will they have ashtrays outside the dole office?