We’re all far too tolerant of the nanny state

Dave O'Connell

A Different View

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

There is a terrific business opportunity out there for someone who’d like to make easy money and allow smokers to enjoy their addiction without having to gaze at the throat tumour that now graces their box of twenty fags.

How about a wrap-around box that just says 20 Major or a replica John Player Blue box, so that the smoker – who needs no reminding that they are wiped five minutes off their life every time they light up – can slip the new state-sponsored horror box into more familiar and friendly surrounds?

It’s not that I have any love for smoking, but I hate the notion of a nanny state even more.

Banning smoking in pubs was a terrific idea because it allowed us non-smokers to enjoy a pint or a meal without the fog of nicotine – and perhaps it caused a few smokers to pack in the habit as well.

But mainly it brought out the best in smokers who abided by a rule that would have been impossible to enforce without their acquiescence – and they stood in the rain or sheltered under lean-tos and then came back in from the cold.

Eventually pubs erected more permanent structures and some even put in heaters and wide-screen TVs, which suddenly meant that the smokers were outside ‘smirting’ – smoking and flirting – while us non-smokers sat inside minding the pints.

The point is that smokers knew they didn’t have the right to inflict their habit on others, so they took it outside – but it wasn’t enough for us to be spared the secondary inhalation, we now want to drive them into submission altogether.

So we’ve put a gaping tumour on the front of cigarette boxes as though the mere sight of this horror would make them realise the error of their ways after thirty years on the fags.

It’s the same nonsense that suggests we’re all driven to drink because we watch the Heineken Cup or that Liverpool fans only drink Carlsberg and Celtic fans only drink John Smith’s.

The most recent epistle – this time from the EU – bans pictures of babies on baby food, because apparently this could idealise the use of such foods, to the detriment of breast-feeding.

Because obviously parents are so shallow that, if they saw a jar with a beautiful baby on it, they’d assume that pouring gallons of that formula down their little mite’s neck until they were a shoo-in for top prize at the Bonny Baby competition.

There’s always some do-gooder who isn’t just content being miserable themselves – they also want to tell everyone else how to live their lives so we can all be miserable together.

Of course the Government has a duty to look after our health, and some of that is through education and some of it seems to be through legislation – the classic carrot and stick approach – but much of this is just an optical illusion.

They might look after our health better if they increased accessibility to hospital beds, if they tackled the spiralling cost of health insurance that is forcing so many to take a chance on giving it up, or if they slashed the layers of bureaucracy that epitomises the HSE.

The long and the short of it is that we won’t start lashing back the Heineken just because we’re watching the Heineken Cup, no more than smokers will stop smoking because there’s a stomach-churning picture on the front of the fag box.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.