Virtue Can Seriously Damage Your Fun

Mary Kenny: When I was young, the church tried to blackmail us into being good. Now the anti-smoking brigade are at it.

A ban on smoking in workplaces, including pubs and restaurants, has been in force in the Irish Republic for more than six months, and throughout the summer it had one picturesque effect. It turned Dublin, and other Irish cities, into Paris, Madrid and Rome. Smart bars and coffee houses had a pavement outlet, or a charming terrazzo, where smokers could indulge in the open air, and young people filled these annexes with their frolics.

You were sorry for poor working class men in poorer working class areas: these seldom had such al fresco extensions, and you would see old guys who had toiled all their lives standing outside the pub door having a pull. Although the trade unions had sought the smoking ban, to protect people in workplaces, let us recall that, from the Spanish civil war to Richard Hoggart’s Leeds, from Orwell to Sartre and Camus, tobacco used to be an elemental aspect of socialist recreational life. Now, even in Paris they have airbrushed away the Gauloise so artfully hanging from the lips of Albert Camus in his standard photograph. Ah, how things change!

And as the winter sets in, the scene is again changing in Dublin; there can be no more continental outdoor pavement cafes and enchanting beer gardens by the willows of the Grand Canal. Now the smokers are driven indoors; or, usually, away.

I sat in the bar of Shelbourne Hotel last weekend – which is by way of being my local when in Dublin – and found it a desolate sight indeed. Oh, to be sure, the air was clean; and doubtless the barmen (now mostly from oversees) were gratified to work in a smoke-free atmosphere. But if it was clean, it was also dead. The clientele of yesteryear – the talkers, the jokers, the coddlers, the poets, the artists, the piss-artists, the general gasbags – had fled, leaving in their place a sprinkling of quiet, respectable, middle-aged folk behaving with impeccable bourgeois decorum.

I looked around and thought nostalgically of the old smoking days when a bar like the Shelbourne’s Side Door represented, to me, great conversation: great, crazy talk, and hilarious, amazing stories. Now it could double as a BNaptist meeting hall.

Many people in Ireland are, indeed, very pleased with the outcome of the smoking ban. The health minister, Micheal Martin, is very pleased. The medical lobby is very pleased – cancer doctors are predicting a dramatic fall in cigarette consumption (this is already happening; Imperial Tobacco claims that sales of cigarettes in the Irish Republic are down by 9.5 per cent over the past six months) and a consequent improvement in health.

Fine. Good. I’m not – any more – a smoker myself, and I think that it is awful to kill yourself with lung cancer at the age of 58, as one of my best friends in Dublin did. But there is a cost for everything – even for virtue. And the cost of Irish smoking ban is a decline in the standard of craic in the Irish pub, especially visible now that the summer has gone and the customers are driven indoors.

Because in order to have that standard of fizzy talk and high-flown verbal interaction, you need to have the young, the reckless, the daring, the devil-may-care among your company. You will seldom get great conversation among a well-behaved, middle-aged bourgeois group, conducting themselves with decorum. It doesn’t happen. You need the Brendan Behans and the Paddy Kavanaghs – the men who brought to the Dublin pub the rip-roaring element of drink, talk, tobacco and danger.

There are, it seems, other costs to the smoking ban in pubs and bars. The pub trade claims a decline of 25 per cent this year. Vintners say that 2 000 jobs have been lost in Dublin alone. Yet people are drinking more alcohol – in the privacy of their own, or friends’, homes.

A report out yesterday puts Ireland at the top of the European alcohol consumption league. Binge drinking is increasing, says the report, produced by the Irish government’s strategic task force on alcohol. Personal expenditure on drink has almost doubled over the past decade or so, and the Irish are currently spending &6 billion on liquor. The pattern of purchasing liquor is shifting from the pub to the off-licence.

So, the health minister’s glad tidings of improved health are possibly a little premature: perhaps the smoking cancers will decrease; but the drink-related ills will increase. (And however dire a cigarette may be to one’s health, nobody gets behind the wheel of a car and kills a child because they overdosed on Sweet Afton.)

The truth about human nature is that it cannot bear too much virtue. Once, the church tried to blackmail us into being good; now the health authoritarians are trying to do something similar. But there has to be an outlet for some naughtiness, a certain amount of flexibility to accommodate original sin – also known as the human condition.

Looking around the sad Shelbourne bar, I was rather glad after all, that my misspent youth occurred when Smoke Got in Your Eyes.

Mary@mary-kenny.com

(«The Guardian», 24.09.2004)