On Tuesday Ireland’s finance minister Jack Chambers delivered the last Budget before the country goes to the polls.
Inevitably, it was a giveaway Budget for all but one group - smokers - who were hit with a €1 increase in excise duty on a pack of 20 cigarettes, pushing the price of the most popular category of cigarette above €18 (£15) for the first time.
To put this in perspective, previous increases had been 75 or, mostly, 50c.
Forest’s response - written and released while I was at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham - appeared in the Irish Daily Mail and a trade publication called Checkout.
I was also interviewed by Radio Kerry, East Coast FM, and Dublin’s FM104. That apart, there was very little reaction to what I described as a “brutal” tax hike, a point noted by Ian O’Doherty in The Spectator yesterday:
In an increasingly puritanical Ireland, that massive price hike has attracted little attention. In fact, the only anger has been coming from smokers themselves and organisations such as Forest, who often appear like the last of the Mohicans when it comes to advocating for a smoker’s basic human right to enjoy a fag without being persecuted or penalised by the eternal-health fantasists of the government and their prohibitionist allies.
Do read the full article, if you can. Not only does it include a quote by me, it features one of Ian’s trademark attacks on a government that he rightly describes as being ‘on an ideological mission to be seen to be tough on smoking … even though they must surely know this is just making things worse’.
See: Ireland’s puritanical attack on smokers (The Spectator)
PS. Full disclosure. In 2018 Ian was the recipient of a ‘Voices of Freedom’ award that we presented to him at a Forest dinner in Dublin.
Today he remains one of the few genuinely libertarian journalists still working in Ireland, and arguably the only mainstream one.
His column in the Irish Independent is usually behind a paywall but he sometimes writes for the online magazine Spiked where his collected articles can be found here.
Below: Ian with his Voices of Freedom award, November 2018
