19th February 2003

Smoking – the jackboot descends

I find it hard to stomach just how little Irish people value personal liberty.

Since the Government decided to outlaw smoking in pubs from next January there has been barely a whisper about the loss of personal liberty involved in this decision. The talk is all about how hard it will be to enforce and the damage it will do to the tourist trade.

What a bunch of cringing sheep! The Government makes a dictat and the good little automatons just roll over and accept it! It makes me sick.

Let’s get this straight. It doesn’t matter how damaging smoking is. It doesn’t matter how many toxins are in it or how many deaths it causes every year. If an adult decides to take the risk then that should be the end of the argument. It’s my body and I’m entitled to do what I like with it.

Of course, the bitter little Nazis who came up with this law had to find a pretext for this repression and the one that they found was employment rights.

Such a problem could be easily overcome if the will was there. Why not ask future employees to sign an indemnity to say that they are aware of the risks? Then they could choose whether or not to work in smoky pubs.

Did I say choose? There’s a laugh. The idea that grown-ups have some right to make choices about their own lives obviously never enters the heads of the stormtroopers of the safety industry. Their tunnel focus is on keeping us alive no matter how arid and banal our controlled existence might become.

Some day Irish people will wake up and find their every move controlled and monitored by bureaucrats and policemen. Month by month the state power grows - whether in motoring law, in stadiums and in boats, in medicines or in the drugs that we consume.

An ID card is on the way, you can be sure of that. A complete bastardisation of the idea of free citizens in a republic is now under way.

We now serve the state rather than the other way round. Our whole lives are to be organized so that we can be more easily monitored. Tagged like cattle we will have our liberty emasculated in case we harm ourselves.

As I say, I’m getting sick of it. I’m ripe to join anyone starting a libertarian movement to fight the descending jackboot of safety law.

But is it constitutional?

The right of citizens to assemble without interference from the state is enshrined in the constitution. Article 40.6 acknowledges the rights of citizens to form unions and associations, and to assemble peaceably and without arms.

So now we have the right to assemble but not to drink and smoke at the same time. Can such a law be constitutional? I hope not.