In the meantime, you may be interested in a 10 minute piece on the Irish smoking ban from the BBC World Service which you can listen to here. You see, the BBC has told the world that Ireland's ban was a great success because they found a former opponent whose pub is still in business. So that's all right then.
He's one of the lucky ones, though, because there were 9,964 licensed pubs in Ireland 2004 when the ban arrived, but only 7,509 - and falling - eight years later in 2012 according to the FT. Or, as one publican described it ...
Landlord Liam Fitzpatrick, who began working in the pub from the age of 14, says there has been a cultural shift in Ireland over the past decade with people drinking at home rather than in the pub.Well, with supermarket booze still being as cheap as it has always been, the cultural shift has been out of pubs and into a place where rules based on junk science don't place an obstacle in front of enjoyment and relaxation. What else would one expect?
The BBC reporter, however, didn't think it was worth mentioning that over a quarter of Ireland's pub stock has been extinguished since the oh-so-wonderful smoke-free experiment in 2004. And there we were thinking that the BBC is a world-renowned source of agenda-free news, eh?
4 comments:
Well, there is a big problem, DP. In the UK, all three main parties are in favour of the smoking ban. Thus, to be politically impartial, the BBC has to report only pro-ban stories.
Why, oh why, do the BBC and other media outlets still cling to the idea that if they say something, the gullible public will simply believe it like it’s gospel truth, along the lines of: “Crumbs! I thought the pub trade had collapsed after the smoking ban, ever since our three local pubs closed within 18 months of it. Obviously I was wrong. They were all just ‘unlucky’ at exactly the same time.”
Maybe it’s because this did seem to be the way of things before the ban, when all those ban-supporters (and, largely, ban-apathists amongst the non-smoking community) swallowed – hook, line and sinker - every story about how the pub trade wouldn’t be harmed by the ban, and about how things would jog on just the same for non-smoking drinkers, so no need to worry about anything. After all, they were told, even smokers would soon “get used to it” and start to come down the pub again to enjoy a lovely, non-smoking evening with their lovely non-smoking chums. It was all going to be such lovely, healthy fun, wasn’t it?
It seems that the BBC haven’t yet realised that whilst they can make very authoritative-sounding proclamations about things that haven’t happened yet and have people believe them, it’s a different story when they are trying to convince people that what has self-evidently happened before their very eyes actually hasn’t really happened at all … their local is still there, it's as busy as ever, all their friends still gather there regularly, and it truly hasn't morphed into a restaurant-with-a-pubby-name. Honest. I know it's true - I saw it on the BBC!
What I love about pubs these days is that you can smell the lavatories and the sweating fellow-customers.
Does Ireland have large pub cos owning most of the pubs? They are the culprits in the UK, apparently.
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