Ireland is undergoing a period of civil protest without parallel in recent memory.

Within months the government wants to enforce a ban on smoking in public places, most notable in pubs. There is little argument on the health merits of such a ban. The evidence, scientific and otherwise, is overwhelming. Tobacco smoke endangers the health of smokers and non-smokers alike. And smoking tobacco is addictive.

Faced with the impossibility of winning their argument on health grounds, publicans countrywide have come up with a uniquely Irish argument. A cultural one. A ban would go against "the culture of the pub".

Janey Mac!

Ban smoking and barbarian hordes of non-smokers will destroy our culture!

What Finn Macool would have made of it all is past imagining. It was the dastardly Walter Raleigh, an Englishman, who introduced smoking to Ireland in the first place.

Just think how wonderful it would be if Ireland were to become free from first and second hand cigarette smoke, and its streets free from the garbage created by empty cigarette packages and cigarette butts.

Which leads into the subject of the bin tax protesters in Dublin's fair city. Its residents, some of them, are resisting a tax on the collection and emptying of garbage bins, and some of them have been imprisoned for up to a month for their sins when their protests were found to be less than constitutional.

One of the protesters sent to the sin bin, otherwise called a state prison, was an member of Dáil Éireann, the Irish Parliament.

Should the culture of protest continue to spread, publicans and politicians, sometimes one and the same thing, soon will make up a preponderant proportion of the prison population. Indeed, they may have to queue up to get in.

And journalists writing about the matter will have to mind their p's and q's if they are to escape the wrath of a proposed government controlled press council.

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