Homogenised, sterilised, standardised, pasteurised and McDonaldsised. That is the characterless uniformity which we are now embracing with an almost fascist enthusiasm.
We allowed self-appointed health tsars spout lies about passive smoking, and have imposed lunatic and repressive laws throughout society on the strength of their ideologically driven falsehoods. Today, Bewley's: tomorrow, the Shelbourne; the day after, Doheny and Nesbitts or Toners or McDaid's or Ryan's of Parkgate Street, and soon we'll be some sodden, grey, sub-Californian shopping mall in which we damply flute "Have a nice day" to all and sundry.
Like most non-smokers, I dislike tobacco smoke: but I dislike the confiscation of freedom to smoke even more. All that was required to cope with the unwelcome ubiquity of cigarette smoke was regulation, not total prohibition. For contrary to what the health-Goebbels have been bawling on top of their voices, there is no clear evidence that small amounts of ambient tobacco smoke cause cancer. None. Indeed, even findings that ambient smoke in any normal social concentration can cause cancer have been hotly rebutted by some scientists.
But of course a regulated law requires complexity and subtlety of thinking - and instead of that we got yelled pieties and judicial decisions which are an affront to logic and common sense. Thus the garage-owner, Thomas Cassidy, who sold cigarettes to a 13-year-old girl, and was fined €250 and ordered to pay €500 costs. But when two adult publicans smoked and allowed others to smoke on their premises, the courts hit them with nearly €10,000 in fines and costs.
This was such a numbing piece of stupidity that the many authoritarians in our midst, who have enthusiastically taken up from where John Charles McQuaid left off, decided simply to ignore it; but they didn't have to worry. The libertarian lobby is about as strong in Ireland as Rastafarianism is in Iceland, and of course, it stayed meekly silent. For all our talk of freedom, we are not a people who cherish individual liberties: we prefer the moral reassurance of the sanctimonious gang.
Well, the sanctimonious gang won't be meeting in Bewley's any more, that's for sure. The final straw for one of Dublin's greatest institutions was the smoking ban, which neatly lopped 10 per cent off its takings. To be sure, as Patrick Campbell says, no single factor was responsible for the death of Bewley's: but the overnight loss of one tenth of revenue would trouble even Microsoft.
Of course, it's not just Bewley's. Our tourism sector is in the direst trouble anyway: so naturally, we have told approximately half the population of Europe that they are not welcome. Yet this is a seriously expensive country, with seriously bad weather, seriously bad transport, and seriously dangerous young men on our streets at night: all in all, were these the ideal circumstances in which to attack our tourist base? Moreover, there is that other terrifying factor which Patrick Campbell - who, remember, saved Bewley's nearly 20 years ago - identified. "We are, as a society, allowing ourselves to become more sterile. We are going to end up with homogenous streets which don't have any character. In California there is nothing like Bewley's. They have all their smoking bans and political correctness and we are creating something like that." But what we're not creating is the Californian weather, or Californian freeways, or Californian beaches with Californian waves. Instead, we are creating a damp, cold, inept copy of barely understood Californian ways: we are gaining nothing and yet losing everything. Yet at least, if we even discussed this choice seriously, with any degree of intellectual or critical vigour, then we could say that we had actively decided on our future.
Except, of course, we're not even doing that. Anyone who defended the right of people to have smoking rooms in pubs and restaurants was virtually accused of being a murderer. Indeed, hysterical self-righteousness was as much an accompaniment to the entire debate on smoking in public as it was on clerical child abuse. In the latter case, we have reached the legal and moral nadir of accepting an allegation of abuse by a cleric as effectively proven, once the accused is dead, and then we promptly shell out compensation to the alleged victim. Why, we are even advertising in the US, looking for more "victims" of clerical abuse to make themselves known, so that we can give them money.
To actually invite American lawyers to come and feed at our public trough - which is effectively what we've been doing - is simple insanity. Indeed, it is such a grotesque violation of common sense that it is perhaps explicable only in psychiatric terms: that ours is a society which has experienced such a colossal emotional and intellectual amputation as to have robbed us of our reason. Maybe, the loss of faith in the Catholic Church has so traumatised us that we are behaving like dazed civilians after a colossal earthquake, doing stupid, illogical things: and one of these is the abolitionist criminalisation of smoking with consenting adults indoors in public places.
Think about it. It is an infinitely more serious offence for an adult to light a cigarette in a pub than it is for that same adult to sell that same cigarette to a little girl. Now - is that a sign that clear and lucid minds are at work? Or is it a sign that minds are not working at all, that the asylum doors are open, and the inmates are loose on the streets? For whatever we're doing, it cannot be described as being either rational or in our own self-interest.