Ban on smoking helps clear the air over Irish attitudes

They were expecting trouble all across Ireland last weekend.

It was the Easter weekend, traditionally marked by celebrations of the 1916 republican uprising against the British.

But this year's concerns about possible skirmishes had nothing to do with anything as noble as republicanism and everything to do with frustrated smokers venting their pent-up fury on the publicans who run the thousands of pubs scattered across Ireland.

Last weekend was the second in which a nationwide smoking ban was in place. Smoking is no longer allowed in any buildings or places of work in Ireland.

For the first 10 days, despite threats of legal action from a variety of bodies, things went remarkably smoothly.

But the Easter weekend was a long one and tolerance for the ban would have worn off; so trouble was expected.

There have been a few unexpected developments, such as the growing demand for the government to now do something about banning the body odour that was previously camouflaged by the overpowering smell of cigarettes. It is apparently particularly bad in late-night dance clubs.

There are also growing complaints about the stale smell of beer and old carpets.

And then there was the guy outside the Bailey pub, just off Grafton Street in Dublin, who broke into an extremely loud racist tirade when he was ejected from the pub by a waiter of Chinese origin.

The guy had refused to put out his cigarette and by law was therefore required to leave the pub and finish his drink outside.

He screamed that as an Irishman he should be allowed to smoke and that no foreigner should be able to insist otherwise.

Given that so many of the waiting staff in this full-employment, Celtic Tiger economy are now of non-Irish origin and find themselves reluctantly and inadvertently at the enforcement edge of the new legislation, there is a possibility that the smoking ban will aggravate racism in some quarters.

But that is far from inevitable.

There were no reports of smoking-related violence anywhere over the Easter weekend and apart from concerns about the development of a Big Brother-type police state, the ban appears to have been welcomed by everyone, including smokers who are desperate to give up.

In addition, judging by the response to a recent spate of media interviews with the public, at this stage in a full-employment situation there seem to be only limited signs of antagonism towards foreigners in Ireland.

The interviews were precipitated by last week's announcement by the Irish government that it would hold a referendum on the citizenship rights of Irish-born children to foreign nationals.

To date, anyone born in Ireland automatically receives citizenship rights. And until 10 years ago there was never any debate about this right, as Ireland was devoid of immigrants.

This situation stemmed from the fact that for much of its 80-year history as an independent republic, Ireland could be described as a 50-30-20 economy: 50 percent of the population emigrated, 30 percent lived below the poverty line and 20 percent was unemployed.

Ireland provided other countries' immigrants. The boom years of the nineties, which have continued into the 21st century, changed all of that.

To satisfy a seemingly insatiable appetite for workers at the bottom end of the employment chain, Ireland had to coax in workers from across the globe - Asia and eastern Europe as well as quite a few from Africa.

This has not only helped to keep a lid on the lower-level wage rates, it has created a situation in which it is estimated that 22 percent of Dublin births are to "non-nationals" who have been granted either no rights of residence or limited rights.

The government now wants voters to decide whether the constitution should be changed so that an Irish-born child of a non-national receives citizenship only if one of the parents has been in the country for three of the previous four years.

That referendum will be held in June, at the same time as the general election and the election for the European Parliament, which will make it a very busy day for voters and might encourage a better voter turnout than has been the case in recent general elections.

And because absolutely nothing is straightforward in politics, there is the additional complication that the citizenship vote does have potentially negative implications for the Good Friday agreement signed between Britain, Northern Ireland and the Republic.

Of course, the ban on the use of plastic bags is much more straightforward.

Ireland introduced that particular ban over two years ago and - unlike the situation in South Africa, where the plastics industry and retailers screamed about the horrendous consequences, not for their bottom lines, of course, but for tens of thousands of poor employees - in Ireland everything went very smoothly and the countryside looks remarkably tidier because of it.