April 05, 2005
It will take a nation of ambulance-chasers to haul us forward
It’s been a year since the smoking ban was introduced to Ireland – a rare occasion where Ireland actually led the way in social change rather than having to be dragged by the scruff of the neck. Of course, it wasn’t due to any great flash of enlightenment – rather, it the prospect of every bar worker in the country filing a lawsuit against the government once the results of a state-sponsored study on passive smoking became known). Still, I suppose there has to be some silver lining to having a country full of litigation-happy lawyers.
If someone had predicted two years ago that the two countries at the forefront of anti-smoking legislation would be Ireland and Italy, they’d have got a good laugh. I don’t how the ban is working in Italy (after all, the Italians already have plenty of traffic laws that they pay no attention to), but compliance is damn-near universal here. It probably helped that it was a mild winter, making the trips outside for a quick nicotine rush a little bit easier to endure – who’d have thought that global warming could been so helpful? (One of the more amusing aspects of the ban has been the insistence of pubs that after-hours drinkers – drinking illegally – have to go outside to have a cigarette. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out what a gaggle of chain-smokers standing outside a pub at two in the morning are up to.)
The local papers mark the anniversary in different ways – the Tribune carry an interview with the Galway Vintners Association chairman – Ollie Crowe, whereas the Western People devote a double-page spread to the issue. Crowe is realistic
They [publicans] have been fighting it long enough. There’s no comeback on it. We’ve seen countrywide it’s for the betterment of everyone.
Another publican quoted in the article is more pessimistic
You can’t drive, you can’t afford it and now you can’t smoke – it’s a combination of things. People [i.e. pub owners] can get over one thing but not three.
In the Western People, the opinions of two Mayo publicans contrast vividly. In Pontoon, John Dever has suffered no loss of business – he built an outdoor, heated shelter complete with weather-proof TV – to keep the punters happy. Chris Lavelle, in Westport is far more gloomy. To quote a subheading from the article
If you’re a paedophile, a rapist or a criminal, you can smoke in the workplace , but if you’re a law-abiding citizen you can’t. It makes no sense!
I don’t want to seem picky, but I’m not sure if convicted sex-offenders refer to their prison cells as “the workplace”. The overall tone of the articles in both papers seems to be that, over time, there will be less pubs doing business in the west. Whether that has much to do with the smoking ban is debatable. The changing attitude to drinking and driving is a much bigger factor*. It is especially tough on rural pubs. And it’s going to get a lot worse (for publicans, that is). Gardaí still have not the legal powers to set up random checkpoints for possible drink-and-driving offences, and as reported recently, the state does not compile statistics on the coroners’ finding in fatal traffic accidents (so, for instance, there are no statistics on how many drivers died as a result of being drunk) This is due to change, and I suspect that the figures will show that a sizeable percentage of drivers who die in single car accidents in the early hours of the morning as a result of ‘falling asleep’ had been drinking.
It doesn’t help either that it has become increasingly expensive to go out for a few drinks. At some point, and it looks like that point has been reached, the price of drink is forcing revellers to either consume less, or to consume booze in other ways. Unsurprisingly, it is the latter. As pub-sales have decreased, to the delight of drink manufacturers, off-licence and supermarket sales have risen accordingly. Lifestyle choices have also been a factor. Many more people spend their nights out in restaurants. Some publicans have already adapted, adding kitchens to their premises, and some of the best eateries in the west of Ireland are both pubs and restaurants.
But not every pub can be a restaurant, and there is a salient fact that is obvious if you have visited almost any other country in the Western world. Compared to any country in Europe or north America, the number of pubs in towns or villages is simply staggering. (I remember visiting a town in Ontario that had a population of 12,000 people and had a single bar. Westport has a population of 5,000 and has 47 pubs). And perhaps another comment from the ever-quotable Lavelle sums up the challenge for publicans.
Looking around the pub at 11.30am [on a Thursday], two young men, one with a pint of lager, the other nursing a cup of coffee. A young barman chatted to them as he wiped the counter.
“This time last year, that counter would have been jammed with customers and look at it now. It just wasn’t paying me at all to keep it open, we were losing so much money during the day”, Chris said with a heavy heart.
I don’t know if we can thank the smoking ban for this change but I find it hard to share Lavelle’s gloom that the people of Ireland have found something else to do on a working day morning other than guzzling pints.
* It’s not just an issue in Ireland. When France cracked down on drinking-and driving, French wine sales declined noticeably.