No smoke without ire

Emissions: The countdown has begun. It's less than a week until the workplace smoking ban sends thousands of people flocking out of buildings onto street corners every time they need to feed the nicotine monkey. Although prone to enjoying a fair number of Cuba's finest firesticks myself, I'm all in favour of it.

Whether or not it's enforceable is another matter. Who's going to monitor the pubs and clubs of Ireland? The Gardaí? Yeah, right. The public? Yeah, right again. Are you going to politely inform a 15-strong Geordie stag party in a pub that they can't smoke? Me neither.

And, as for policing the mobile workplace, fuhgeddaboutit. Is a garda going to be stationed along Dublin's quays to pull over truckers smoking with one hand and driving with the other? I imagine one would soon see one of those hands being quickly employed to throttle the poor policeman if he dared.

It's not just banned in the obvious places like buses, taxis, trains and ambulances. The long unyellowed fingers of the anti-smoking law are more far-reaching than that. It'll also apply to bread vans, delivery trucks, bin lorries, hearses, Sean the Salesman's company Vectra, the list goes on.

But when is a workplace not a workplace? Is a farmer chuffing a pipe while driving his tractor around his own fields technically at work and therefore in breach? But if he drives to Mass in self-same vehicle, surely he's off work and legally entitled to puff away to his heart's content? Only in Ireland . . .

And when a taxi driver fancies a smoke, does he simply take the sign off his roof, instantly transforming his workplace to a family car that happens to have a meter? Finished his fag, he can just pop the sign back on again, 10 seconds before you get into the car and just as it begins to smell like the recreation room in a Russian prison.

I'm old enough to remember handing over my schoolboy's five pence bus fare through a fog of blue smoke to a corpulent conductor spilling ash from his Major into his battered leather change pouch. It's been years since smoking was banned on buses, but you'd barely know from observing the thousands of people each day who gleefully ignore the fact.

I was nearly decapitated recently by a massive thug and his spindly girlfriend on an evening rush-hour bus down the South Circular Road for objecting to them lighting up. "Dere's no bleedin' signs." She was right. "But you know there's no smoking allowed," I beseeched, trying to appeal to her better nature. She didn't have one. "How do you feckin' know what she knows?" growled her beau. "Mind yer own business or ye'll get a slap."

I looked around for support. Almost instantaneously, every single person on the packed upper deck found something inordinately interesting to look at through the window. There was an eerie silence as the beast glowered at me. I found myself swayed by his impressive articulacy, highly-tuned intellect and obvious proficiency in the techniques of dialectical reasoning. That and the fact he had fists like Limerick hams.

Defeated, I turned away and tensed up, readying myself for what I reckoned was an inevitable thump on the back of my skull. Thankfully, it never came.

Chastened, I resigned myself to joining the ranks of the intimidated masses. I suspect by the end of next week membership of this silent majority will have swelled exponentially.

With the gardai at their wit's end trying to stop us all from killing each other in pubs and the public's (justifiable) fear of violent retribution far outweighing their sense of civic responsibility, what chance is there of enforcing a motorised smoking ban?