Sometime in the middle-distant future - around 2020 or 2030, perhaps - some anthropologist in the Institute of Weird Studies in Southern Transylvania will make an astonishing breakthrough, writes Fintan O'Toole.
Like Margaret Mead discovering sex in Samoa or Claude Levi-Strauss contemplating the significance of the difference between raw and cooked foods in the evolution of civilisation, it will be a ground-breaking moment for the study of human cultures. It will be called something like The Implementation of the Smoking Ban: How the Irish Learned to Obey the Rules. It will astonish the world by challenging the universally accepted truth that the Irish are a bunch of perverse anarchists, and thus re-order the basic categories of common assumptions. It will blow countless minds.
My own, I have to admit, is pretty well blown already. I have, in the last 10 days, had two experiences that, in the immortal language of Star Trek, do not compute.
The weekend before last I happened to be in Norway. Norway - Scandinavia - the place where they do things right, get their act together and in every way put us to shame with their ability to be civilised. Late in the northern night that hardly happens in the summer, I mentioned to my heavily smoking companions in the bar that we had banned this sort of thing in Ireland.
I expected hoots of derisive laughter, but instead got soberly nodding heads. They knew all about Micheál Martin. He had been there as a missionary the week before. And - though I still wonder as I write these words whether some of the mushrooms in my casserole weren't magic - they had decided to follow the civic, sensible, responsible Irish example.
I still half-thought that this was some kind of crazy alcohol-induced dream that I had mixed up with reality until last Friday night, when I was in a bar in the west of Ireland. It is still early by Irish standards - about half past nine - and the gentle middle-aged owner is sitting up at the bar himself having a quiet pint of stout before the madness begins.
About six feet away, a lovely gleaming young blond girl was sipping her Bacardi Breezer. Without thinking, she took out a packet of cigarettes and plucked a fag between her middle fingers. Her left hand automatically fished for her lighter. Unconsciously, out of pure habit, she looked like she was about to light up.
And what happened next was an amazing example of real Irish authority at work. It solved at once the deep mystery of why the smoking ban has enjoyed something like 100 per cent compliance - the first 100 per cent of anything in the entire history of Irish civilisation. Though you wouldn't know it from the stupid hysterical bluster of their failed campaign against the smoking ban, publicans, especially in small communities, are experts in human behaviour. They have seen us at our merriest and maddest. They carry in their heads complex maps of the intricate but narrow terrain between happy, charming Irish and vicious, obstreperous Irish.
That moment when the publican's eyes locked onto the blonde's unthinking gestures, the possibility of her taking power in his domain with a cigarette in one hand and a box of matches in the other, might have been followed by some moments of extreme ugliness. The publican roars and spits. The young woman feels insulted and oppressed and defiant. There is a screaming match, a stand-off. Everyone looks at the floor. Someone finally suggests calling the guards. Everyone suddenly realises that this is rural Ireland and there are no feckin' guards. The whole thing ends up in a sordid, inane mess. And everyone's evening, to one degree or another, is ruined.
Except none of this happened. What did happen was that, in that tiny moment, there was a rather beautiful and rather brilliant enactment of a common cultural decency. The publican flicked that switch in his head that turned on the twinkle in his eyes and the humour in his smile. He didn't issue a Teutonic shout of "Obey the law!" He just looked at her, and with a perfectly modulated sigh, said: "And I thought this was going to be a quiet night." The young woman laughed softly, stood up and went outside to have her smoke. On the way out, as she passed him, she touched his shoulder. In that elegant, minimalist exchange of a few words and a tiny gesture, there was an eloquent implied conversation: "You could be my daughter, don't give me a hard time." "I could be your daughter. I'm not going to embarrass you."
Somehow, in this reckless society of drunk-drivers, illegal-dumpers, tax-dodgers, and feckless feckers, this tiny moment of supremely effective law-enforcement seemed both terribly depressing and wonderfully hopeful. It is depressing to reflect that the smoking ban has worked because it is enforced by publicans and bar-servers, rather than by police, priests, politicians or tax-collectors. The Garda can't get us to stop massacring each other on the roads. The priests and politicians have no credibility. The tax-collectors are laughed at by the big boys. But the dispensers of alcohol have an authority that we don't want to mess with.
The hopeful bit? Just that, somewhere within us, we have a sense of common decency that, if properly led, could actually manifest itself in our communal life.