Anti-smoking ban brigade’s tar and feathers fail to stick to the facts

NO insult to the Minister for Health, but he’s never going to amount to anything as a fascist.

The Mussolini jaw-jut would take him ages to master. Anyway, he's too consultative by nature. Fascists issue orders and search-and-destroy anyone slow to obey. Micheál Martin initiates consultative processes and like a boxer protecting his midriff warmly embraces his most virulent opponents.

So when the man on the radio programme during the week described the Minister for Health as a fascist over the way he's driving smokers out of pubs, everybody did a double-take, trying to visualise the minister with a knotted whip, lashing the poor nicotine addicts mercilessly ahead of him out into the cold and the dark, where imagination inevitably suggested there would be smoking, but maybe weeping and gnashing of teeth also.

What the man on the radio who shall be nameless because, although I was on the same radio programme, I never caught his name was doing was using a propaganda tool. He was 'spinning'. Because the majority of the listeners to the programme would be non-smokers or smokers trying to quit, he wasn't going to argue for the right of pubs to continue killing staff and customers by inflicting passive smoking on them.

He was handing single ownership of the issue to one individual the minister and in the process demonising that individual.

It's a great propaganda move and we're going to see more of it in the next few months. Suggesting that Micheál Martin is an anti-smoking obsessive fulfilling some obscure personal need by bullying unwilling victims into obeying an unreasonable rule he dreamed up all by his little self will be Plank #1 in the anti-ban campaign.

It will be interesting to see if the Department of Health's PR advisors can nail this one, establishing in the public mind the reality that this is Government legislation, passed by the Cabinet, which makes collective decisions and up to this point at any rate having made a decision, stands by it, even if individual Cabinet members didn't and don't like the move.

Splintering Plank #1 will also require conveying to the public, in vivid, interesting and unanswerable terms the data on which the Cabinet decision was based, so that people who are for the ban not only know why it was introduced, but can cogently argue on its behalf.

Plank #2 in any public debate about cigarettes is to query the research on which the decision to restrict smoking was based. Big Tobacco always finds something wrong with the research or with its correlation and seeks more, longer and better investigation. They are even willing to subsidise the research. Research is the ultimate in defensible postponement of action. This propaganda plank hasn't come much into play yet, in the current argument, but it will.

Plank #3, on the other hand, has been hugely in evidence over the past month or so. Plank #3 is the compromise plank. It allows the opponents of the ban on smoking in pubs to appear sweetly reasonable, while portraying proponents of the ban as rigid puritanical control-freaks. The very word has a caressing ring to it, does it not? It's like the way we talk to injured children: "Come on over here to Mammy, she'll kiss it better and put a compromise on it."

The compromise plank is the most invidious of all of the arguments in the sophisticated anti-ban campaign. It erodes the confidence of those who are mildly converted to the ban, so that they begin to wonder aloud if it wouldn't be more reasonable to go for a compromise, and it irritates the completely convinced into gibbering incoherence.

In fact, the relevance of compromise depends entirely on the context. It might be possible to persuade a Viking, setting out for Ireland in his long ship with the objective of murder, rape and pillage, to compromise and just go for murder, but it's a compromise that's shag all good to the dead Irish people. The 'compromise' so warmly and sweetly pushed by the anti-ban people is a Viking compromise: you're going to be just as dead, but THEY are going to feel better about it.

PLANK #4 is the presentation of 'alternatives' and accessorising of those 'alternatives' with words like 'reasonable', while at the same time, the ban is surrounded by the anti-ban propagandists with words like 'draconian' and 'fascist'. Here, again, the appeal is to the middle ground, the people who don't want a fight. The propaganda gently suggests that better ventilation would solve all problems and what the minister should do is give pubs and clubs and restaurants time to get a few Expelairs in and Bob will be our uncle.

The fact is that to extract second-hand smoke from such venues would require a fan as powerful as a tornado.

Plank #5 is job losses. We'll all be ruined, says Hanrahan. Here's the economy beginning to get droopy and now that fascist is doing away with all these jobs with his ban on smoking in pubs.

For propaganda purposes, when you pull the job-losses threat, vagueness won't do. You have to quantify the numbers. The current anti-ban campaign has done this professionally. The figure they adduced is now part of public currency.

When journalists asked where the figures came from, the campaign crisply answered that they came from the New York situation.

What was shocking was how many journalists and interviewers accepted this in nodding silence, rather than saying: "Hang on. That ban was introduced in the middle of winter and is less than half a year old and the indications are that any initial drop in business has evened out and precisely where do the individual jobs lost in your big figure come from and who can we check with about them?"

So far, media has not only accepted the job-loss figure presented, but failed to notice the longer term implication: that asthmatics and bronchitics and non-smoking families who currently can't go near pubs may troop in thousands to smoke-free pubs, sustaining existing jobs and creating more.

A strong challenge has come from the Mandate union, which has indicated that its members want safe workplaces, but doesn't seem to have pointed out that buying jobs by killing and maiming people kind of went out of fashion back when poverty-stricken communities in the US were expected to watch their menfolk puking up their lungs as a result of asbestosis and console themselves that the asbestos industry was creating jobs.

Plank #6 claims the ban will destroy our national culture, because without cigarettes we can't talk, think, drink or have fun.

It is, on the face of it, an outrageous notion, but never forget the efficacy of Goebbels' Big Lie.

All those pushing Plank #6 really need is a slogan linking cigarette-fuelled craic to tourism: Holiday in Ireland. Pubs and restaurants to die for.