Madam, - The central truth about the smoking ban is being missed: its motivation is purely one of intolerance.
Any assertion that its purpose is to "save lives" is politically correct cant: banning smoking in places of work was simply the formulation most likely to yield watertight legislation.
If the Government were serious about promoting health, it would concentrate on improving the health service and forget about the statistically negligible (and unprovable) threat of passive smoking.
The intolerant always require complete victory and submission to their will.
So the diktat of the overtly pious, covertly fascist health-Nazis behind the smoking ban must be made to run everywhere, not just where its proponents happen to choose to be.
If it were not so, Big Brother could easily have seen his way to the obvious compromise: 70 per cent of bars definitely non-smoking; 30 per cent smoking, with bar staff free to choose where they serve.
Once, intolerance in Ireland was religious. Now it is secular, but no less obnoxious (pun unintended) for that. - Yours, etc.,
CONOR SEXTON, Castleside Drive, Rathfarnham, Dublin 14.
Madam, - Complaints from publicans about the reduced turnover resulting from the smoking ban have elicited the usual mantra. Why don't they reduce prices? If a particular publican cut the price of his pint by one euro, turnover would shoot up.
Turnover in other pubs in the area would go down.
Some of the other pubs would be forced to reduce their prices. Sales in the first pub would then go back to previous levels, but at lower prices, and costs would not have gone down. Bankruptcy would loom.
Simple economics indicates what will really happen.
The distributive trades buy goods wholesale, and sell them on to the public in smaller amounts.
Publicans are in precisely the same position as the supermarket, except that they are selling a highly taxed legal drug for consumption on the premises, and their costs are necessarily many times higher per unit sold.
A list of costs starts with wages, rent and/or mortgage, insurance, rates, repairs and replacements, cleaning, security, office expenses, and heating. Surplus staff can be fired, but, in the short term, most of these costs are inflexible.
The smoking ban has reduced the number of drinks sold, and so the amount of overhead costs to be added to each drink is higher by nearly as much as the percentage of trade lost.
Contrary to many opinions, the publican has to make a living, so the price of drink will go up.
This is one more inevitable consequence of the smoking ban. - Yours, etc.,
BRIAN CROWLEY, Lower Pembroke Street, Dublin 2.