Madam, - Picture the scene. A crowded Galway city centre pub last Saturday afternoon. The air is thick with acrid cigarette smoke, filtered and unfiltered (i.e. "roll-ups"). Indeed, so pungent is the "air" that I can taste it on my tongue.
Within seconds of stepping through the doors, my eyes are starting to sting. Most of the customers are sitting or standing playing pool and listening to rock music. Nearly all of them are in their twenties.
And that's when I see them: two babies - and I mean babies, they can't be more than three months old - sitting in prams amid all that smoke. It is a truly pitiful, even grotesque sight.
In the manner of infants everywhere, one of them immediately registers the newcomer's presence and gazes up into my face. If he could speak, I wonder would he muster the strength, from his tiny, smoke-clogged lungs, to plead "Get me out of here"? If there was any form of ventilation, I didn't notice it.
Last year I confronted two women, again in a city bar, who had their babies in their laps while they smoked. When I remarked that the babies were rather young to start smoking, both adults gave me a dull, blank look, as though bringing a baby into a smoky pub was the most natural, loving thing a mother could do.
If I had made any such remarks last Saturday (supposing I could locate the babies' parent/parents) I have no doubt I would have got a response along the lines of "Ya wha?", or have been designated "a snob". I would almost certainly have been told to go forth and multiply, so to speak.
As it was, I turned and left the pub, feeling a deep sense of shame and cowardice.
I'm sure many readers can think of occasions when they encountered similar scenes. And yet could any of us imagine a similar occasion in a bar in, say, Germany or Sweden? I recently spent a week in England. Not once did I see a baby or a toddler in a pub. And that's England - a country that's supposed to have gone to the dogs years ago.
Michéal Martin might yet be remembered as the man who protected the country's children when their erstwhile "parents" were too dumb to do so. For this he should be applauded. - Yours, etc.,
KEVIN WHELAN,
Salthill,
Galway.