If ever there was a test of our sense of freedom, tobacco provides it. Cigarette-smoking is the most purposeless of vices. Cigarettes make you die, they make you smell, they make you poor: the drug of fools.
So why should I feel such unease at the prospect of a new apparatus of tobacco censorship? Who else hears of the creation of a 15-strong secretariat in the newly created and splendidly named "Office of Tobacco Control" with a sinking heart? Is it not all a little familiar, a re-run of the days when the Government commanded that advertisements for condoms be scissored from incoming British magazines at source? Do bells not ring to remind you of boards of censorship, when the literary guardianship of Catholic faith and morals was done by State bodies banning anything that bore the fatal whiff of heresy?
Like with like
No, no, no, I can hear people declare, you are not comparing like with like. But in these matters, like can't be compared with like. It never can be. If history were all about comparing like with like, we would never make mistakes and sagacity would ooze from our every pore as we lolled in our Garden of Eden. That is what history does: it always presents us with new problems that are never quite the same as the ones we've learnt how to handle.
As once it was hard to talk about sex in a rational way; now it is next to impossible to talk rationally about tobacco, not least because, by any measure, tobacco companies are an utter abomination. They have concealed the truth about how lethal cigarettes are, they have accumulated vast fortunes out of delivering people to perfectly terrible deaths, and now they are diversifying through the poorest countries in the world to compensate for the lost markets of Europe and the US. Ah. The poor lambs.
However, there's a shortage of high moral ground here. Governments have always made more money from tobacco than have the tobacco manufacturers. If the proceeds of tobacco duty went directly to funding the treatment of illnesses contracted by the people who paid the tobacco duty - namely the smokers - that might have been some compensation. It didn't happen. Instead, governments used the proceeds from tobacco duty to subsidise whatever electorally pleasing projects were required to keep them in power, just as the managers of tobacco companies used whatever promotional ploys would be required to make their investors happy.
Both governments and industry alike entered a devil's accord to make staggering amounts of money out of tobacco, even as it spread an epidemic of emphysema, numerous cancers, heart attacks, strokes and a veritable scythed-chariot of amputations through the population at large. The difference between government and industry is that governments, which earned the fattest profits from tobacco, but without capital risk or management skill or enterprise, for the past 30 years have regularly delivered uplifting little ethical homilies on the evils of a trade by which they have profited so much.
Busy-body government
Good. Nothing like a whiff of humbug to brace the old bronchioles. But, of course, if you wish to infect your lungs rather more literally with carcinogens, that is your right - as it is my right to be spared your unused molecules of tobacco smoke. I dislike smoke; but equally, I dislike interfering, busy-body government, especially when it blocks publications it doesn't want me to see, or creates unworkable or unenforceable regulations for the purpose of making its committee members feel better.
Enter the Office of Tobacco Control, minor heir to the noble traditions established by the Office of Public Order of the French Revolution. What will this band of stalwarts do to improve society and human nature? Outlaw all cigarette smoking in places of public resort? Ban all magazines containing cigarette advertising? Block all incoming television signals bearing advertisements for cigarettes? Declare the creation of Year Nicotinic Zero?
The Minister for Health, Micheal Martin, proposes laws that will prevent foreign magazines with a circulation in this State of more than 10,000 from carrying advertising for tobacco products. So if a British magazine publisher caps sales per issue in Ireland at 9,999, he (or especially she) will conform with the law, as all Irish magazines will be prohibited from carrying tobacco advertising. Meanwhile, RTE is expected to come up with some technological way of covering Grand Prix racing without showing the tobacco advertising on the cars.
Satellite communication
We know this is fatuous idiocy, for how can such fatuities be legally enforced? In the era of satellite communication and the Internet, we know they can't: all the Government can do is to unleash its Nictotinic Committee for Public Safety over local media. Yet we know that the Minister strives against Grand Prix in vain (as if the Grand Prix teams even noticed). Within five years' time, virtually all Grand Prix events will be held in Asia, where tobacco is colossal business, and beamed to Ireland by media beyond the Government's control.
Yet what is truly frightening when one listens to the Minister is that his ultimate ambition seems to be to put tobacco in the same category as marijuana, which this country has, as we all know, been so astoundingly successful in repressing. Do governments never learn they can only do so much? Excessive tax creates smuggling. Excessive censorship attacks freedom. Excessive virtue ennobles vice. Excessive power subverts authority. But what politician ever entered politics to do without power and to admit failure? Not Micheal Martin, we may be sure.