In the months before the duty-free rip-offs at airports were finally closed by EU edict, Aer Rianta solemnly assured us of the catastrophic consequences which would ensue. Airports would almost cease to function, writes Kevin Myers.
Thousands of jobs would be lost. Dublin airport would, without the vital prop of duty-free sales, soon resemble a bus-stop in Mali: a couple of hawkers selling peanuts from a tray, and a dog scratching itself, as a de Havilland Moth splutters on the pitted runway.
In reality, duty-free areas were free of just one thing only: common sense.
Wine and spirit prices in duty-free shops, especially those dealing with the high-taxed Irish market, were often higher than duty-paid supermarket prices in most European capitals.
Moreover, it was hardly surprising that some of the richest men in the US were duty-free tycoons, because the key to all duty-free outlets is that the trader pockets the unpaid duty. And this is possible for a number of reasons: a) duty frees are local monopolies, b) their customers are made witless from airport tension, from the need to buy a present for someone on the other side, from perplexity over the price of real things in the real world, and currency differences.
Aer Rianta and the then Minister Whose Job It Is To Protect State Monopoly, Mary O'Rourke, naturally used a familiar old scare tactic in their argument: job losses. But of course, any time monopolists want to oppose reform, they invariably reach into that handy cupboard marked "job losses", and that way, they'll get their headline, and even seem to win the moral argument.
Well, despite the promise of certain poverty and catastrophic job losses, duty-free areas were closed down. And what happened? Nothing very much.
Dublin airport remains a bustling area of economic activity, where the simple rules of airport trading - high prices, no local competition, and buyers made witless by boredom, stupidity and tension - still apply. But naturally, when the job losses don't occur, those gloomy soothsayers are strangely unapologetic.
The job-loss merchants are at the games again, as the newly formed "Irish Hospitality Industry Alliance" declares that the proposed ban on smoking in the pubs and restaurants could cost 65,000 jobs. That's three thousand more people than were in Croke Park last Sunday. In other words, a hell of a lot.
Why only 65,000? If 65,000 are put directly out of work, then there are 65,000 people no longer able to pay for a vast range of goods and services, and all the people who provide those goods and services will be put of work too. And all those people who provide goods and services to those people who provide goods and services to those people who'll be put of work because of the smoking ban will be put of work.
And then all the people who provide. . .but you get my drift. So why didn't the "Irish Hospitality Industry Alliance" actually say that if the Minister succeeds in banning smoking in pubs and restaurants, Ireland within months will resemble Albania in 1952, that the few remaining restaurants would have paupered infants on the menu, that unemployment will exceed the official population, and food aid will be arriving on mules from Chad? That's certainly as realistic a picture as the prediction of 65,000 job losses. Because there's no way of knowing how many jobs will be "lost" if a smoking ban is introduced.
Certainly, there are many people who might spend more time in pubs if a smoking ban were introduced. Simply, there's no way of knowing the results of the law.
However, Joe Browne of the Vintners' Federation is on surer ground when he declared of the proposed law that "publicans can't enforce it." Never a truer word, Joe.
Publicans are already utterly unable to enforce the easily enforceable law which simply makes it illegal to serve a drunk, as the streets of Dublin, Cork, Athlone, Galway at midnight almost any day of the week will testify. Poor publicans.
Perhaps it's easier for the IHIA to deal with magically concocted "figures" than with the abstract notion of freedom, which is not something dear to Irish hearts. After all, it's not so long ago that this country outlawed condoms and male homosexual acts: there was no tumult of dissent, no passionate outcry. Only European law, and AIDS, changed our laws, not political pressure. For Ireland is a morally inert country, attached passionately to no individual liberties.
Certainly, the IHIA didn't argue that consenting adults have the basic freedom to inhale strangers' smoke if they wish. That is much a right as it is to buy a condom.
There are good libertarian grounds for arguing that pubs and restaurants should be licensed to allow smokers; and those are places which most of all I will want to stay clear of, for I detest cigarette smoke.
That is my choice; smokers, surely, are entitled to a choice of their own.
The IHIA instead proposes larger no-smoking areas in pubs: but it's as much a fiction that no-smoking areas protect non-smokers from smoke as it is that 65,000 people will be made jobless if the proposed law - indiscriminate, anti-libertarian, doctrinaire and probably unworkable - is passed.
For anti-smokers, just a few molecules of oxidised tobacco in the eyes are quite enough.
Anyway, which State agency will enforce the new law? The same State agency which doesn't enforce the dog-muzzling laws? Or the one that doesn't enforce the litter laws? Or the one that doesn't enforce the plastic-bags tax? Or the one that doesn't erect proper signposts?