Actor Frank Kelly is no born again moralist when it comes to discussing the merits of having given up smoking. "I still have a passion for a distant whiff of the stuff. But when it gets into my lungs it upsets me."

Kelly started smoking at 14, and admits he was hooked immediately. "I was so addicted to them I used to climb out of my bedroom window and go down to the chipper in Blackrock where you could buy one cigarette," he says. However, he rarely smoked more than eight or 10 a day - except when he was drinking. Then he could smoke up to 20 in a day, he says. Moving on to the pipe and later to cigars, Kelly still speaks of the immense pleasure smoking gave him, mentioning brand names almost as one would old friends. "I loved nicotine. If I knew it didn't do me any harm, I'd go back on it tomorrow. My wife never minded me smoking a pipe because she felt it put me at my ease. I wasn't tetchy or difficult when I was smoking the pipe. But then I started inhaling the tobacco from the pipe too. Later, I fooled myself by smoking cigars. I loved those firm little Dutch cigars."

Finally, his body began to send out some strong messages to quit. "I felt muscle ache and fatigue around the time we began Father Ted. I knew it was the nicotine, so I quit. I was in London at the time and quite soon after giving up, I was bounding up stairs and walking down Euston Road at high speed. I was oxygenated and my lungs could think again," says Kelly. Now, more than four years later, Kelly is ready to share his quitting technique. "Don't tell a soul - not even your wife. Just say things like `I don't want a cigarette at the moment' and nobody will notice you've quit," he advises, during a break from rehearsals for a tour of John B. Keane's play Moll.

Although it is contrary to one of the current popular approaches to giving up smoking - which is loosely based on changing your self identity as a smoker to one as a non-smoker - Kelly is convinced of the merits of his silent method. "My wife swears she noticed I'd stopped, but she didn't," says Kelly, who is a little sad that people don't now remember that he was a smoker. "When people say things like `but you never smoked, did you, Frank?' I get very hurt." Carolyn Fisher, publicist with RTE, was one of three recruits who appeared on the Late Late Show earlier this year before and after they had given up smoking. She says that although she can understand how some people can give up in silence, she found the public element to be of value. "Because it was so public, you felt this overwhelming sense of people wishing you well and supporting you on your journey," she says. "I get comments all the time about it, like `are you still off them? Good for you' or `you're looking much better'. "

The method used by Fisher who, over four months later, is still off the cigarettes, involved attending a four-hour seminar which questions all your personal beliefs on the benefits of smoking. Run by Brenda Sweeney, these courses are - following the Late Late Show endorsements - booked out for several months, testimony to the number of people who want to give up smoking. Recent figures claim that one in three Irish people smoke, three-quarters of whom want to or are trying to stop. Meanwhile, the Frank Kellys of this world don't resort to any of the props of the burgeoning "giving up smoking" industry. Ironically, Kelly is now one of the judges in the Nicorette-sponsored Stop Smoking Achievement Awards, an annual award given to Ireland's most inspiring person to quit (entry forms in your local pharmacy).

In spite of his eloquent descriptions of the joys of smoking (including the conspiratorial feeling one gets from smoking in the dark), Kelly is proud that he has quit. "You feel so virtuous. I wanted to put a banner outside my house saying `I've quit. I'm a genius, I'm a martyr." However, according to Kelly, the real feeling of success at breaking the habit lies with the lighter. "You know that you've really stopped when you no longer carry a cigarette lighter in the belief that you may need it to light someone else's cigarette or even when you go camping!" Unbelievably, Kelly claims he's never had wild craving or days of desperation. "If I had withdrawal symptoms, I never took them out on anyone else. And I've put too much work into getting rid of them to go back on them."

As to how he copes with social occasions without a cigarette or even a cigar, he jokes that having another drink gives him something to do with his hands. "It is much easier not smoking now as so many people no longer smoke." But he adds: "There is a new morality about being a non-smoker, which I think is a bore. Smoking is a convivial thing. I lost a friend when I stopped smoking."

World No Tobacco Day is on Monday