Did you hear the latest from anti-smoking lobby, Ash Ireland? They've called on the Government to ban adults from smoking in cars carrying children under the age of 16. Some of you may be hacking into your ashtrays and shaking your yellowed fists in furious anger at the very mention of such a defilement of your basic human right to do what you like, writes Kilian Doyle
Others may be nodding your heads in vigorous agreement, and loudly denouncing all smokers as the spawn of the scumsucking leeches that feed on Lucifer's chilblains. I'm leaning towards the latter position, sanctimonious git of an ex-smoker that I am. (Aren't we all?)
Ash's suggestion is a bit Nanny state, but eminently sensible nonetheless. It may come as some surprise to you - it certainly did to me when the realisation dawned - but I'm not averse to sensible every so often. Man cannot live on kneejerk reactions alone.
I see it all the time: cars driven by hatchet-featured witches and leather-faced goons peering through the fug, wheezing and gasping as they chuff deeply on their soggy butts. One can barely make out the silhouette of their suffering offspring. The poor kids are often so green around the gills they could be mistaken for newts.
Ask 98 per cent of people - smokers or otherwise - if they'd shove a lit cigarette in their six-year-old kid's mouth and they'd vehemently reject the suggestion as high-grade mentalism (the other 2 per cent are the sort who train their children to knife-fight in bars for money).
But that's exactly what you are doing when you smoke in a car with your progeny in the back. Smoking in an enclosed space - such as a car - is lethal as far as passive smoking goes. According to Ash, part of the US state of Colorado's justification for banning smoking in cars was research that showed they can be 23 times more toxic than houses in the context of passive smoke. I suppose you could always drive with the windows open. But that - considering that most days in Ireland are damper than a haddock's pocket - would just give your brood pneumonia instead of emphysema.
Now, not that a ban will do much good. There's the question of enforcement. When you've got a police force unable to halt daylight heroin dealing in every city in the land, gougers wandering the streets carrying submachine guns and motorists brazenly flouting every law they can think of, who's going to stop parents having a sneaky smoke behind the wheel? Their kids?
Ash say they ideally want a total ban on smoking in cars, but would accept the chuffing-with-children measure "in the interim". Steady there, lads. If people want to smoke themselves to death on their own in their cars, I reckon let them at it. Not out of any sense of safeguarding personal freedoms, but rather because the alternative doesn't bear thinking about. The fact is, for many of the unhinged lunatics currently cruising our highways, nicotine is the only thing between them remaining calm in traffic and embarking on axe-wielding rampages.