How appropriate that we left the old millennium in a great festival of lawlessness, unprecedented since the Dublin disturbances over the stamp shortages in 1916, with a state-wide fireworks display. You probably are aware that it is illegal to buy, sell, import, distribute or use fireworks without a government licence; and that in turn probably involves a vetting process of several thousand civil servants, the Garda Commissioner and possibly the Army's Rangers Wing. After several years of contemplating the pros and cons of a particular application for a fireworks display, those exalted panjandrums will then decide that a particular display may not, after all, go ahead; meanwhile, thousands of impromptu and illegal fireworks displays will have already lit the night skies across the country.
Hunting for condoms
Remember condoms? Remember it was a criminal offence to buy or sell them? Remember customs officers used to search incoming luggage in the hunt for small rubber sheaths, to be confiscated lest the Irish people be contaminated by them? Remember we had a penal code which could cause people to be imprisoned for trading in such little objects? Remember what a laughing stock this made of us? Remember how reluctant our political establishment was to legalise what was rampantly available anyway? And remember the role of the Virgin Megastore in the entire sorry farce?
No? Ah. No doubt too painful to remember. Let me refresh your memory. The Virgin Megastore decided that the law was an ass, and, perhaps hoping that it could seek long-term comfort before higher European courts, decided to permit the Irish Family Planning Association to sell condoms to those people who needed them - young people in its Dublin store.
The sale of a single condom 10 years ago tomorrow, in one of the most shaming moments in Irish jurisprudence, led to a prosecution which ended with IFPA/Virgin Megastore being fined £400. On appeal, that fine was increased to £500, with the judge - a Mr O'Hanrahan - observing that he was letting the accused off lightly. What an interesting interpretation of the law that a fine of £500 for the sale of a single condom to an unknown person might be considered as letting anybody off lightly. And it got worse. The law as it then stood meant that each further condom sale would attract a fine of £5,000, with an additional fine of £250 for each single day condoms continued to be sold, with possible imprisonment for the evil wrongdoers as well.
This court case was not in 1891, but 1991.
Political busybodies
The Irish Family Planning Association was nearly closed down by the court's savage response to its decision to sell condoms, something many of us have comfortably forgotten; as we have also comfortably forgotten how Virgin Megastore didn't open - with a fireworks display over the Liffey. That was what it wanted; that is what it didn't get. Our political establishment, those moral busybodies who are never happier than when interfering in other peoples' lives, refused to grant a permit for a fireworks display in the centre of the capital.
Rockets one year; rubbers another. There's one problem for those who would impose their trivial, witless will on us. The Border. Northern Ireland. Perfidious Albion. Just as condoms were pouring into the Republic from Northern Ireland, even while the Health (Family Planning) of 1979, the invention of that model of sexual continence, Charles Haughey, threatened civil liberties left, right and centre, so today fireworks are unstoppably and illegally pouring into the Republic.
Yet again last Hallowe'en we had the same plaintive requests from the Garda Siochana warning law-abiding citizens against the illegal purchase of fireworks, while intrepid plainclothes officers patrolled Henry Street sleuthing after banger-merchants and seeking out contraband Roman candles. Heroes one and all.
It's not difficult to work out the benefits of abandoning prohibitions on anything. Legalising something means it can be regulated. The State can demand standards, can impose rules, can punish those who break the rules. Alcohol only blinds when it is outlawed, because then it is beyond regulation. Leaky condoms are sold when condoms are illegal and unmonitored. The banning of the sale of fireworks to children is a realistic proposition only when adults are actually allowed to buy them.
Blanket ban
The State can enforce standards on that which it permits. It can do no such thing when it applies a blanket ban on the commodity in question; all it can do is send gardai in false beards and small shoes trawling through shopping precincts looking for purveyors of illegal merchandise - hooch in Chicago in the 1920s, johnnies in Ireland of the 1980s, whizz-bangs in Ireland of the 2000s. Thank God we have a police force, is all I can say.
But, as we saw when the millennium broke, the Garda has been enforcing a meaningless, unworkable law. That doesn't mean the fine lads and lasses of Dail Eireann will take time off from doing their expenses, their tongues between their teeth, to change the law. That would require a libertarian conviction of some kind, and most TDs wouldn't know a libertarian conviction from a manhole-cover. The law remains because there's no lobby group in either direction. Inertia rules - as it doesn't in the case of our monstrous licensing laws, of which more soon. Happy new millennium, pyrotechnicians.