The huffing and puffing of the smoking campaigners has been unexpectedly exhilarating, writes Kathy Sheridan.
Prize for best scare tactic has to be for the one about women forced by the health fascists to trudge outside for a puff. They could get raped out there, like. Or mugged.
"Civil liberties" make regular appearances, chased by Nanny State, amid dire warnings about allowing Daddy Government to decide what is virtue and what is vice.
We've had the "oppressed minority" being "demonised" by "electoral dictatorships" . . . a third of the entire hospitality workforce threatened by the dole. . . pub-owning families left to starve. But hats off to Leinster House's own Colin Farrell, that edgy rebel, Cool Martin Cullen, for cutting the crap, crystallising what this entire debate is about: political correctness. You know that scourge of guys who just wanna walk on the wild side and call people niggers and knackers.
This week's poll suggests that Cool Cullen is winning friends. Maybe we are a tad too po-faced - up ourselves, like - to see that some folks are just born to be wild? The tobacco industry, as usual, was way ahead of us. I don't know when Cool Cullen started puffing, but if it was around the late 1970s, here's a likely scenario.
That's when Imperial Tobacco surreptitiously interviewed teenage smokers, aged 16 or 17, using hidden video cameras, to discern what made them smoke. Amazingly, the company found the fatalism among these young people to be amazing: "A few clearly did not wish to live to a ripe old age." Had none of these bozos heard Peter Townshend blast "Hope I die before I get old"? He recanted. Amazingly.
Anyway, they concluded: "Ads for teenagers must be denoted by a lack of artificiality, and a sense of honesty. . . If freedom from pressure and authority can also be communicated, so much the better." A later study, in 1982, found, amazingly, that smoking appealed to youngsters' rebellious nature (hi there, Cool): "Rebelliousness and boldness, beyond curiosity, accounted for many early trials."
In 1983, Brown & Williamson paid stg£320,000 to Sylvester Stallone to smoke its cigarettes in five films, including Rambo. Very cool. Come 1985, though, Imperial's mother ship, BAT, was concerned that cigarettes were facing "competition with cannabis, glue-sniffing and possibly hard drugs - heroin and cocaine". So they put the kids right, right?
"We must find a way to appeal to the young, who want to protest, so that the product image and the product will satisfy this part of the market. The cigar and pipe market has an 'old' image. Cigarettes will follow as something 'my father and grandfather did'." Isn't it ironic? The very boys and girls who fancied themselves as rebels were being herded into dependency, as surely as those 1950s housewives on tranquillisers.
Little has changed. Diminishing opportunities to promote its wares merely has the industry concentrating its firepower. Philip Morris has supplied free cigarettes to film productions, including the PG-rated Grease, The Muppet Movie and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
There is more smoking in films now than at any time since the 1960s, according to the chairman of the Irish Film Board. The reason is clear. A recent study in the Lancet followed non-smoking children aged 11 to 15 and found that the more times they saw smoking on screen, the more likely they were to begin smoking. Four-fifths of smokers are addicted before they reach 20.
How many of the child consumers of those slick, precisely-focused campaigns of the 1970s and '80s now suffer from those classic rebel symptoms, such as sexual impotence, lung cancer, heart attack, respiratory problems, infertility et al? Smoking is not about Nanny Statism or showing two-fingered salutes to "political correctness".
It is an addiction with devastating consequences for huge numbers of its dependants, their families and innocent bystanders. A Cork University Hospital oncologist writes that it accounts for 25 per cent of the cancers they see there and fills 50 per cent of their beds.
So why has support for the ban fallen from over 70 per cent to barely half in a few weeks? Search me. As the same oncologist remarked, if mobile phone masts (which have no proven health risks) were installed in pubs, there would be a public outcry.
Yet which of us would consciously opt to see a child of ours being thrown at the mercy of Big Tobacco for all her hacking, wheezing years? Even half-awake parents know that pubs and clubs are where their teenagers most want to strike a "cool" pose, which often involves the languid exhaling of tobacco smoke.
As the tobacco men discovered, it's not about curiosity to begin with; it's about being a rebel. Remember that, all you middle-aged "rebels" in government and out of it. Big Tobacco has your measure. And your children's too.