20 years of Ireland's smoking ban — how the campaign came about and how people reacted
Which To Minister Smoking Pic: In Health, Then Of The The Run Car For His In The Up Sign No Smoking Boot The Carried He Browne Around With Ban: Gavin Martin Micheál
Michael O’Donovan remembers the days before the smoking ban. Born and raised above his famous family pub, The Castle Inn in the heart of Cork city, the 48-year-old lived and breathed its smoky atmosphere every day.
“When I came home from school, you’d be hit with the smell and the sight of smoke in the bar. Later on, when I got married, I’d get home to my wife who used to get me to take the clothes off and get into the shower because I used to stink of smoke. Your eyes would be sore and red. There was yellow film on the television set that had to be cleaned every few days. Small things like that. But you wouldn’t have noticed it because you were working in it and you were used to it.”
Twenty years ago this week, Michael’s world was changed by a fellow Corkonian brought up in a very different world.
“I never smoked, no,” says Tánaiste Micheál Martin. “I think it was parental influence. My father was a sportsman even though he had the odd fag with a pint himself.”
At the turn of the millennium, Micheál was appointed Minister for Health. It was his second cabinet appointment.
“When you’re Minister for Health dealing with smoking is a no-brainer,” says the Fianna Fáil leader. “You actually have an obligation to deal with it in my opinion.”
On entering the new role, Micheál established the Office of Tobacco Control under civil servant Tom Power who was, according to Micheál, “an encyclopaedia on tobacco". The office soon produced a report on the health effects of environmental tobacco smoke in the workplace.
“That report landed on my desk in December 2002,” he recalls, “and it was unequivocal that environmental tobacco smoke, in other words, passive smoking, is a carcinogen. So that posed a moral question to me, if that was asbestos there’s no doubt what you’d do. Myself and Tom went through the various plans and options and we decided we were going to go ahead with it.”
On January 30, 2003 the then Minister for Health announced his intention to have a ban on smoking in all workplaces across the country in place on New Year’s Day the following year.
“I remember Bertie running down after me after the cabinet meeting,” recalls the Tánaiste. “'When is that coming in?'. Panic.”
“We were apprehensive,” recalls Michael O’Donovan.
"70-80% of our customers were smokers and we were worried about it wiping out our business. I remember going to a Vintners' meeting when the proposal came in and there must have been over 300 publicans at it from Cork alone. It was a very feisty meeting because everyone was fearful. It was just the unknown. While it was all workplaces, it was our industry that was going to suffer so that’s why there was so much opposition to it.”
For the next year (and a bit as it turned out due to complications with some European Union members) debate raged in every smoke-filled pub, in every newspaper and on nicotine-lacquered TV screens across the land. The Irish Health Alliance made up of a range of NGOs and those in favour of the ban promoted its undeniable benefits while those in the Irish Hospitality Alliance said the ban would result in the decimation of bars, restaurants, and hotels and would result in the loss of 50,000 jobs.
To make their point the Hospitality Alliance flew some members to New York to find out how a similar ban in the city might be impacting their trade. The Tánaiste decided to go out on a fact-finding mission of his own.
“It was the first official 'pub crawl' by any minister,” he says. “I met a young lad from Tipperary in one place who didn't know who I was and he said the first month was difficult, but then it was fantastic.” The minister took the opportunity to seek advice from those who had brought the measure into the Big Apple and met with local mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who advised him to work on compliance.
“The environmental health officers of the various health boards across the country were fantastic,” recalls the Tánaiste.
“They visited pubs, restaurants, hotels explaining how to do the compliance piece about warning signs, making sure no ashtrays were available. Pretty simple stuff but it was all about working with people.”
Pubs and restaurants, realising that this was going to happen, did what people in the hospitality trade do best; they adapted and found a way to try and make the new laws work.
“We had a yard at the back of our pub where we used to keep our empty kegs,” says Michael O’Donovan. “We cleared it out, put up shelving, painted it, and eventually we got awnings put in not to cover it but to give a bit of shelter. We had to make sure the correct ventilation was there.”
The Tánaiste admits that on the morning of the ban he was “anxious”. But he would soon have a reason to feel a little more confident, albeit from a highly unlikely source.
“I always remember Gerry Ryan on 2FM sent out an undercover reporter to a dockers' pub in Dublin,” he recalls.
“The reporter took out her cigarette at the bar and you could hear the barman saying ‘ah-ah’. That went out live to hundreds of thousands of people across the country and I always remember a big cheer went up in the Department that morning when they heard that. If it was going to happen in a dockers' pub at that hour of the morning it was going to happen everywhere else.”
As well as the likes of the Irish Cancer Society, ASH, and other organisations, the Táinaiste is keen to acknowledge the role of the trade unions who early on in the debate endorsed the measure as a workers' health issue. But overall it was the public that made the early days of the ban a success.
“We underestimated them at the beginning when we announced all of this,” says Micheál. “We didn’t do any polling or focus groups. Nothing. But later on there were polls taken and 70% of the people wanted it.”
Not long after the ban came in, studies were carried out that discovered improved pulmonary function of bar staff, vastly improved air quality as well as reduced levels of benzene and carbon monoxide.
“I’m an asthmatic,” says Michael O’Donovan. “I used to go through an inhaler once a week and suddenly I was using one every two months. The stink off my clothes, those tired red eyes; all of that was gone. It really improved the workplace. That yard that we converted became the meeting place. Even if you were a non-smoker you’d go to the yard to meet and chat. It kind of became the new hub.”
But that’s not to say it was all plain sailing. While the health benefits became apparent almost immediately, Michael says it took years before he was confident his pub would make it through: “The first few years of it were scary. There was still a concern. We didn’t see a drop in trade but you were still looking at your figures, your sales and costs. Everyone was delighted with the health side of it but we still had the business to run.”
Twenty years on, he says that the decision was the correct one. The only change in clientele that he sees is an increase in tourists who he feels became more willing to visit pubs that were now smoke-free and cleaner.
“Now looking back it was absolutely the right decision,” he says. “Had we a crystal ball at the time, we would have said 'brilliant'. Back then we just didn’t know.”