The Minister for Justice, Mr Zero Tolerance O'Donoghue has, I presume, a bin under his desk; he should fill it immediately with the 130 pages of the report from the All-Party Committee on Liquor Licensing Laws, and start again. It is clearly a soft-shoe shuffle between the politicians' compulsive instinct to interfere in our lives, and yet not too grievously offend that mightily powerful lobby, the licensed vintners.
Not that it's likely ZT will go so far as to take a principled stand against the political instinct to meddle in other peoples' lives - after all, that's what impels men and women into politics in the first place. Not that there's much power in native politics anyway, these days. Authority has shifted east and soon we shall be governed from Bonn or Berlin. What is left for our native politicians to do, but tinker with and intrude on our private habits?
There are two conflicting philosophies at issue here; one accepts that the state has the fundamental right to exercise authority almost at random over its subjects; and the other grants to citizens the right to behave as they wish, free of the authority of the state, provided no unconsenting person is unreasonably discommoded. Subject, citizen; Hobbes, Locke. Locke and citizenhood are the boys for me.
What right have they?
This is a republic. Did the nannies on the All-Party Committee ask themselves what right they have to regulate the drinking hours of the citizens of a republic? Did they ask what right they have to forbid, on pain of penalty, one person to sell drink to another person at one particular hour and not another? Did they ask themselves about the philosophic difference between a man buying a bottle of stout at 12.29 am on a Thursday, (no offence) buying one at 12.31 am on a Thursday (offence) and buying one at 12.31 am on a Friday (no offence)?
Did they? Probably not. There's little enough evidence of abstract thought in political life in Ireland at the best of times; and now, as they see power slipping away from them, our politicians seem more thoughtlessly addicted to the minor manipulation of our lives than ever before - hence the idiotic proposal above.
In Britain, where the libertarian revolution has been far more complete than here, politicians are contemplating 24hour licences for bars. And other things being equal, why not? The issue should not be whether or not the state has a right to interfere in the private transactions of individuals, but whether those transactions interfere with the rights of others - the most obvious right being the right to sleep, to enjoy peace and quiet, the right to be spared drunkenness in the street.
These are reasonable considerations, the relevance of which in part changes according to geography. Nobody who lives in the city centre expects to have the same tranquillity that they might find on Croagh Patrick. But, provided people leave and enter a hostelry in good order, why should they not be able to buy drinks at any stage of day or night? Why should the huge apparatus of the state be positioned to outlaw people from drinking in pubs, but not night clubs, at one a.m.? What possible cause is being served, what good is being done, what considered philosophical principle being maintained?
Frequent delinquency
None, none whatever. And whatever actual practical points might be raised in opposition to late night drinking - rowdiness, insane intoxication, drunk-driving - are pertinent at any time of day. It is illegal to serve drink to someone who is conspicuously drunk; yet who has not seen the nearly comatose being served in pubs until "nearly" no longer applies? Who has not seen clusters of drunks weaving and swaying at street corners? Who has not seen why Temple Bar is now Temple Bladder? Who has not heard the news each weekend of the latest high-speed motoring slaughter of yet another bunch of drunken teenagers?
Such delinquency should not justify the undelinquent, the happy reveller, the holidaymaker, being prevented from having a drink at one, two, three in the morning, as they do in Madrid or Barcelona, where one never sees drunkenness or rowdiness. Provided their houses are orderly, publicans should be able to serve drinks through to breakfast and beyond. IF THEY WANT.
But not, according to the All Nanny Committee on Liquor Licensing Laws, whose 70 recommendations seem to be a gigantic exercise in witless and obsessive statism. The committee has laboured long and hard to propose that closing time from Sundays through to Wednesdays be 11.30, winter and summer, and from Thursday through to Saturdays it should be 12.30. What a committee of giants! What intellectual colossuses to have come to such a decision!
No justification
Why those times? Because the All Party Nanny Committee drew from some deep well of chrono-alcoholic sagacity? Or because those times are a simple incremental increase on the old rules, devised when the State really did think it knew better, and when it intervened at all sorts of levels to prevent people getting their hands on "pornography" and literature and condoms and vast amounts of innocuous film. In 1998, we know that there's no justification for the State deciding that a deed moves from legality to illegality, merely because the hands of the clock have shifted a quarter of an inch.
ZT, the thing at your feet is the bin. Time to use it.