Postscript to the previous post.
As well as sending press releases to the Irish media, Forest Eireann has been emailing a handful of Irish bloggers in an effort to generate some discussion of smoking online.
No joy. With the honourable exception of Grandad, whose brilliant Head Rambles blog is essential reading, we haven't found a single libertarian or smoker-friendly blog in the whole of Ireland. Not one.
Not even Twenty Major, a blog that is sub-titled, quite erroneously, 'Still smoking in Dublin bars'. Last year, reacting to a press release from Forest Eireann the author sniffed:
Like a few others I’ve just been spammed by a group called Forest Eireann. Their aim is to ‘Campaign against the denormalisation of smoking and the vilification of smokers by the tobacco control lobby’.
They have a spokesman called John Mallon from Cork. He says:
"I’m no radical but I believe in the citizen’s right to oppose those things that seek to marginalise them. The outcome of the smoking ban, now in its sixth year in Ireland, suggests that it has been counter-productive. Smoking rates have increased while one pub a day closes due to the effects of the ban."
Really? It’s the smoking ban that’s forcing pubs to close? Here was I thinking it was the fact that drinking in pubs is now ridiculously expensive. We’re fleeced for beers, spirits, soft drinks, the whole lot.
Regulations mean pubs can’t have ‘happy hours’ to bring in customers and very few pubs are doing anything to attract customers, like, you know, lowering the price of drink, which is why people go to pubs. Not to smoke.
I don't doubt that the price of drinks, and drink driving laws, have had a significant effect on Ireland's pubs. But let's get this straight. A blogger called Twenty Major, whose blog features the legend 'Still smoking in Dublin bars', claims that people go to pubs only to drink. Not to smoke.
Another Irish blogger, responding to our study which showed a clear correlation between the smoking ban and a rapid increase in pub closures in Ireland, complained that since the ban "smokers monopolise the outside tables at licensed premises, leaving us to having to stay inside on the nicest of summer days or put up with breathing in their noxious fumes".
Yesterday Forest Eireann received the most po-faced response from another blogger who claims to be a "political junkie" yet clearly has no interest in one of the most important political and cultural issues of our time.
Replying to our press release about the loss of 7,000 workers in the pub/drinks industry in Ireland in 2010, he wrote:
To whom it may concern,
Please remove me from your email list. I have not signed up for it and you do not advertise on the list a way of removing one's self from the email list which is a breach of the data protection act.
I love visiting Ireland, on business and on holiday. But can someone tell me why there is so little interest in defending, ahem, individual liberty or promoting the free market?
I can find no evidence of a single free market think tank. Nothing, certainly, on a par with the Adam Smith Institute or the Institute of Economic Affairs in Britain.
The Freedom Institute, a free-market classical-liberal think tank was founded in Ireland in 2003, but four years later it folded and its founder fled to England.
The Progressive Democrats, a liberal, free-market political party founded in 1985, was disbanded in 2009.
Ireland, it seems, is a graveyard for social and economic liberals. Why that is I have no idea, but it does explain the absence of any serious opposition to the smoking ban and the subsequent tobacco display ban.
PS. Having written this post I visited Twenty Major to see what he was writing about today. (Not smoking, obviously.) His last and, it appears, final post was on April 4 and the headline is 'Game over'.
For Twenty Major, perhaps, but not for us.
PS. Over on Head Rambles Grandad has just published a piece entitled Nation of sheep or "What the fuck is wrong with the Irish?".
I couldn't possibly comment.