Britain uses the Irish experience to stub out case against smoking ban

READING the British newspapers this week gives one a real sense of déjà vu.

'Cigarette snoopers to enforce ban How they plan to catch you,' ran the Daily Telegraph front page on Tuesday. 'Smoking to be banned in all places of work by end of 2008,' proclaimed the London Times headline yesterday.

Squeezed between trivia about a TV prankster squirting water at Tom Cruise and reports about Tony Blair's tough stance at last weekend's EU summit, the British media is trying to conduct a debate about the introduction of a smoking ban, and the debate there is taking almost exactly the same turns and twists that it did here two years ago.

The debate in Scotland and Wales is over. The Scottish parliament is about to pass a law which will impose a smoking ban in all workplaces and enclosed public spaces from next spring. The Welsh assembly wishes to adopt the same overall ban and is awaiting legal power to do so.

In England, the situation is a bit more complicated. In typical New Labour fashion the government is being hesitant, but it is gradually getting towards the introduction of a ban similar to our own. Last November, in a white paper on public health, the government proposed a ban on smoking in all enclosed workplaces in England. The then health secretary, John Reid, himself a notorious smoker, was lukewarm on the idea and famously patronised the working classes by arguing that an all-out ban would be unfair to them.

However, after the post-election reshuffle, the new health secretary is Patricia Hewitt, who is a stronger anti-smoking advocate. This week she published her latest proposals which promise a ban in "almost" all workplaces and in all places serving food by the end of 2008.

There are a number of exceptions which are somewhat unworkable and may be removed after the current consultation process finishes next September.

In England the debate about the ban is going through the same phases it did here. They have already been through the first phase where opponents tried to argue that passive smoking isn't really harmful.

However, it is now generally accepted there that second-hand smoking kills and, like they did in Ireland, the medical profession has presented the overwhelming evidence on this point. The Royal College of Nurses has been a particularly strong advocate of the ban, putting its money where its mouth is by launching a public post-carding campaign.

A study by the surgeon-general pointed out that treating smoking-related illnesses currently costs the British NHS an estimated £1.7 billion. It argues that smoking is the biggest cause of preventable ill health and premature death in the UK, killing more than 114,000 people every year, and argues that passive smoking causes anything up to 16,000 additional deaths in Britain.

The medics and scientists have also rowed in just as they did in Ireland to debunk those arguments about how ventilation would solve the problem.

The Irish experience since has served as a useful case study for health advocates in the English debate. For example, a study by the respiratory laboratory at St James' Hospital, Dublin, which found that the level of carbon monoxide in the lungs of non-smoking bar workers had fallen by 45% since the ban was introduced, has been given considerable publicity by those representing workers in the British pub trade.

The debate in England has now moved on to arguments like "it's a breach of smokers' human rights" and "it will be unworkable," which we heard here in the last six months before its introduction. A large British smokers' rights group called Forrest this week described the proposed ban as "a nanny state measure" which would be "excessive, disproportionate, and illiberal."

The British Beer and Pub Association, in response to the proposals published this week, suggested that local authorities will not have the resources to ensure compliance and that there will be brawls as drunks refuse to comply. However, the Irish experience where peer enforcement has been the main means of policing the ban, and where there has been almost complete compliance, has again been cited to dispel such fears.

Where the Irish experience has been of most assistance to the English campaigners has been in refuting the economic arguments about a threatened collapse of the hospitality industry. While there has been some fall-off here in the last two years, almost all of it can be attributed to factors other than the smoking ban. A Europe-wide trend towards drinking alcohol at home, and towards drinking with food, has been the primary reason for the fall-off in the trade.

In Ireland this has been compounded by public resentment about the high cost of alcohol (and indeed the high prices of non-alcoholic drinks) in pubs and by a desire to dissociate from the more unpleasant aspects of binge drinking.

However, even given all these factors there has been no collapse of the hospitality industry which some vintners had been scaremongering about before the ban was introduced here. Also familiar has been the way much of the British media, especially the Tory press, has struggled with trying to have a clear view of the ban. To keep to type they have to be sceptical about state regulation in this area, as they are in all areas, and of course they can't be seen to be overly enthusiastic about any New Labour proposal but, as was the case here, the media have had to bow to the reality that all polls show that the overwhelming majority of their readers are big fans of the smoking ban idea.

One of the arguments advanced in the later stages of the debate here was that a ban would cause a particular problem from businesses in the border areas. It was argued, for example, that there would be a flood of conferences, customers and weddings to hotels in the North. This hasn't proven to be the case and now Northern Ireland looks likely soon to get its own smoking ban.

The North's Department of Health and Social Services completed a public consultation process in March on options for a workplace smoking ban there and it appears the widest public support is for a total ban similar to that in the Republic.

Shaun Woodward, a minister at the Northern Ireland Office, is expected to make a major public health speech in Belfast next Tuesday. Some of the Northern media are speculating that, in part because of the land border with the Republic, he will go further that the proposals in England and opt for an all-out ban.

Others think that in the absence of local political cover from a re-established Stormont, he will be more cautious initially.

Considerable financial resources were directed by the tobacco industry against Micheál Martin's original proposals. They knew that if the smoking ban was introduced in Ireland it would work and if it worked in Ireland the arguments against its introduction elsewhere would fade away. Thankfully, the tobacco industry's worst nightmare has come to pass. Where the Republic of Ireland trail-blazed, Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland now look set to follow.