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.