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TWENTY YEARS BEFORE the smoking ban, the Government was worried it wouldn’t be able to enforce a ban on students and teachers smoking in school classrooms
A 1984 briefing memo for the Taoiseach’s department noted that, while Health Minister Barry Desmond felt that such a ban would have “great exemplary value”, there was concern that it wouldn’t be complied with.
It reads:
Smoking is not forbidden for teachers while they are on duty but it is not encouraged,and teachers are expected to refrain from smoking in classrooms. However, in some schools smoking in the classroom is an accepted practice.The Minster feels that a ban would have great exemplary value and would encounter little opposition from responsible parents, teachers or pupils. While there may be difficulty in imposing it, the minster feels that the ban on smoking should apply to teachers as well as pupils.
“This will bring home to the pupils the full seriousness of the implications of smoking,” it adds.
The note related to a new tobacco bill which sought tighter controls on smoking. It contained provisions for more prominent warnings on tobacco products and a ban on smoking in state and semi-state offices.
A complete ban on smoking in hospital was not proposed as part of the legislation but a ban on smoking by staff and visitors was included.
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My teachers smoked openly while teaching us. It was a different time. Kids sat on parents laps in the front seat of cars and it was almost obligatory to drink and drive . when my father had an old estate escort my sister and I travelled in the boot as a matter of course. No room on the seats. We used to live it . Had loads of room and used to knot our sisters hair without them realising it. We were gutting when he got a saloon later on and we couldn’t travel in the boot anymore .
And there was an unwritten ban on parking in a place if there was room for the car…
Luxury Catherine.
I used to live in a shoebox int side of the road
Shoebox? We livd in a lake
A lake?! We used to DREAM of living in a lake!
Well ye have all missed the point with the old monty python rip off. We didnt feel we had it bad at all. I loved my childhood thanks. Even though it happened before political correctness was invented we survived to tell the tale. In many ways we had much more freedom back then
And nobody keeled over from passive smoke?
Bring on the Nanny state, a burning Tayto Bag would be a million times more toxix than a plant which is cigarette smoke.
We have numerous incidents of life long smokers living till a ripe old age, seriously give smokers some room you politically correct idiots
btw women use to be allowed smoke in the dorm with new born babies back in the days when cigarette smoke was not a political correct nut issue.
I think most of those children from the 50′s 60′s 70′s 80″s are probably still alive if they’re dead well maybe it wasn’t really fag smoke that killed them but poitical correctness that drove them over the edge?.
Catherine is correct in what she says, this is how we grew up as kids also, well, certainly in rural Ireland anyway, public transport was not widely available and is still not great, u just could then or even now just hop on the next bus in 10 mins time, and we still might not see a bus eirann bus pass once a day
Banning smoking has nothing to do with political correctness . Cigarettes kill half the people who use them and more , fair enough some smokers live to be 100 , and yea I could be hit by a bus but I’m not going to run around blind folded on streets of Dublin asking to be hit either . A stupid comment from someone who obviously never lowered the coffins of smoking parents into the ground
So if your parents didn’t smoke you wouldn’t have lowered their coffins? Would they be immortal ffs?? 80% of new cancer cases today are diagnosed in NON smokers. Cancer cases continue to increase despite the decades-long reduction in smokers; eg between 2000 and 2008 (in just 8 years) in USA, new lung cancers increased by nearly a THIRD! (31%)(ACS 2010).
IF cigs kill half of smokers – A) how many NON smokers are killed because they don’t smoke? B) What causes eg. cancer in NON smokers? C) How many smokers are killed by the same cause(s) that kill non smokers? (Serious questions!). By the way, it is invariably smokers who live to a mega age – it is a general rule, rather than the exception!
Don’t be conned by anti-smoker repeated propaganda! A lie, repeated often enough, may appear to become the truth, but it still remains a lie.
Maybe they died Gary because such is life, it seems every ailment is smoking related if you smoke. but if as many non smokers die of the same so called smoking related diseases?, was/is it smoking related?.
Cigarettes are not going to improve your health, but the hysteria surrounding its danger to passive smokers is gone beyond a joke, you will not die from inhaling a small bit of cigarette smoke, if that was the case every cigarette smoker who often live to a ripe old age would be dead in 10 seconds.
Which would you rather sitting in a car with 4 fag smokers or a pipe from your car exhaust?.
You won the war so please leave the hell alone smokers, we are not the most poisonous species on the planet far from it, but political correctness has poisoned so many naive minds to make us out as if we are walking Chernobyl’s!.
Smokers blowing this poison out of their mouths will kill a lot more of non smokers
You say that as a true ‘believer’ alan, with a true religious faith that considers ‘sinners will go to the depths of hell when they die’.
There is NO credible evidence that smokers pose any risk to non smokers. The same type of evidence that allegedly claims passive smoke ‘risk’ ALSO shows that it is much LESS of a risk than eating butter, liver or drinking milk, using a mobile phone or living in the proximity of overhead electric power cables etc. Where are the campaigns to ban these and many other, more serious, ‘high’ health risks? Indeed there is some evidence that passive smoke can be beneficial to children!! (eg Boffetta et al)
This should be no surprise given that there isn’t any conclusive evidence that ACTIVE smoking is harmful, only theoretical assumptions of harm based on mid C20th inexact statistical correlations (that we now find today are in fact adverse correlations) No one has EVER been proven to have died of smoking, neither active nor passive, despite the rhetoric you hear constantly from the anti-smoker industry – (it keeps their extensive public funding rolling in)
The dangers of smoking are well understood. But recently the dangers have been talked up so much it’s beginning to sound like the boy who cried wolf.
@gary Jordan…The so-called ‘smoking related disease’ is one of the antismokers’ cleverest inventions. To say that a disease is ‘smoking-related’ is not the same as saying that it is directly caused by smoking, or that there is any actual proof of anything. It means simply that someone has decided that smoking MAY be a factor in that disease.
Over the last couple of decades, more and more diseases have been added to the list, often with very little evidence. Heart disease was one of the first, even though it has something like 300 risk factors, and some major studies (for instance, that of the citizens of Framingham, Massachusetts, which has been going on since 1948) have shown not only that the link with smoking is weak, but that moderate smokers have LESS heart disease than nonsmokers.
More recently it has become fashionable to blame smoking for just about everything… from ‘clogging up’ of the arteries (which happens to everyone as they get older) to blindness (well, they can’t blame masturbation any more) to AIDS. It has also become fashionable, every time a smoker dies, to try to find a way to blame their death on smoking.
The fact is that many statistics about smoking (and especially ‘secondhand’ smoke) are simply made up. For instance, until cervical cancer was recently proven to be caused by a virus, a completely random 13% of cases were attributed to smoking!
The great thing about the ‘smoking-related disease,’ is that it allows you to create the perception of a raging epidemic. The UK government says that 100,000 or 120,000 deaths per year (depending on who is speaking at the time) are caused by ‘smoking-related disease’. The impression given is that these are all deaths specifically, and provably, caused by smoking. It is no such thing.
It includes non-smokers who die of bronchitis or strokes, and smokers who die of heart attacks in their 90s. It includes people who quit smoking decades before. It is not exactly lying, it is fearmongering and deliberately misleading.
Dreaming of living in a lake????? We were so poor we couldnt afford a dream
What a country you could smoke in class but couldn’t wear a condom, during sex that is not in class.
It was even worse than that, you couldn’t wear a condom any time.
I found a big box of condoms in 1983, 80×3 packs, made a fortune from the women in town.
Neal Ireland bellow
Condoms don’t kill you.
Neal
Sorry misspelled part of your name due to this phone having a mind of its own and me not checking correctly before posting my apologies.
If condoms were sent by post to Ireland the sorters used to stick a pin in them
We had a smoking room in school that only 5th and 6th year students could use and that was provided that they were over 18 and had permission from their folks.
Did we go to the same school?
1964 , teacher smoked in Chemistry class.
Billy Chenowith_CBC Monkstown Park
Anyone excluded from the smoking room would smoke in the push bike shed.
We had one in Terenure under the stage in the concert hall and it was stopped in 1990 or 1991.
Thankfully, things have moved on now and smoking is frowned upon as it should be. Hopefully, with the next generation it will be completely obsolete.
Its the only legally sold product that is fatal if used in the way it is meant to be used. Drink kills if abused, guns kill if the person holding them wants to kill with them. Smoking kills if you smoke.
How else is a gun meant to be used if not to kill things?
You can’t really dig your garden with one
You can use a gun to for target practise, you can abuse a gun and murder someone. The point is a gun is made to fire a projectile which can be used to kill or not kill depending on the intention of the user. The intention plays no part in smoking as the end result is a gamble when used in the correct way.
In fairness Conor Homer used his gun for everything…
De Wit wrote of cigarettes, “Its the only legally sold product that is fatal if used in the way it is meant to be used. ”
Wrong De Wit. Alcohol is carcinogenic, so in a certain proportion of drinkers it kills the drinkers through carcinogenesis, plus it kills many more by accident. Here in the US, roughly 1,600 people die each year from falling down the stairs. I would imagine that a fair proportion of those falls would not have happened if the person hadn’t had their balance/attention thrown just a bit off by two or three drinks. And the number of innocent lives lost when these people knock into them and cause THEM to fall down the stairs as well has never been counted!
And how about “fast food” ? We know that an improper diet that relies largely on the salty/fatty things in most fast food results in massive numbers of heart attacks each year. Should we mandate that everyone live on dried seaweed sprinkled with a few flakes of cheese and some soya cubes floating in distilled water? Just think of all the lives that could be saved! And if we properly trained our children during their most impressionable years, they’d never miss the McWhoppers and live their longer lives quite happily!
And don’t get me started on the substantial fumes from carcinogenic alcohol (roughly 1,000 mg/glass/hour) which drinkers force down the throats and sinuses of anyone in the same room with them while they’re guzzling! Or the carcinogenic cooking fumes in restaurants that allow the cooking to be done in the same building where people are trying to breathe while eating their dinners! Sure, the kitchens are “ventilated,” but, as the Antismokers tell us over and over, “Ventilation doesn’t work” in protecting people… even in separate rooms, correct?
- MJM
P.S. if you doubt the problem with alcohol fumes, you can read my full analysis of it at the British Medical Journal Response/Papers link at:
http://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/30/secondary-smoke-alcohol-and-deaths
- MJM
I remember students openly smoking when I started secondary school. Only 5th and 6th years were allowed.
It’s not your fault De Wit but I can’t read your name with out shuddering and getting a little bit sick in my mouth. When I was a kid we used to get dosed regularly with worm syrup. Kids had worms a lot back them apparently. It was the vilest substance known to man and I hated it. It was called De Wits worm syrup. The sight of the bottle was enough to give me the shakes lol sorry for sharing lol
I remember it well, my father used to make everyone who walked in the door of our house have a big spoon of it or cod liver oil. I had a weird friend that loved them both.
Nowt wrong with t’odd smoke, t’woolpack’s not same since t’smoking prohibition.
I would’nt mind the smoking ban so much if it was’nt for the ignorant ¢unt who introduced it.
I was in hospital in Jervis St in the 80′s and we had an ashtray by our bed! I could smoke away while recovering from the anesthetic!! And there were patients in those wards with serious lung disease! Imagine that nowadays.
I remember reading a book about 1984 that was written as far back in the past as 1984 was in the future and now 1984 ıs probably as far back in history as the book writing was from 1984.
I’ve looked at 1984 from both sides now.
Teacher smoked in my 3rd class of 86/87 .
In the last half century the cigarette has been transformed. The fragrant has become foul. . . . An emblem of attraction has become repulsive. A mark of sociability has become deviant. A public behavior is now virtually private. Not only has the meaning of the cigarette been transformed but even more the meaning of the smoker [who] has become a pariah . . . the object of scorn and hostility.”
This change from fragrant to foul has not come from the smoke which has remained a constant. The shift is an entirely psychological one. Unfortunately, the way the shift is manufactured is through negative conditioning. The constant play on fear and hatred through inflammatory propaganda warps perception. Ambient tobacco smoke was essentially a background phenomenon. Now exposure to tobacco smoke (SHS) has been fraudulently manufactured into something on a par with a bio-weapon like, say, sarin gas. There are now quite a few who screech that they “can’t stand” the “stench” of smoke, or the smoke is “overwhelming”; there are now those, hand cupped over mouth, that attempt to avoid even a whiff of dilute remnants of smoke – even outdoors. There are those that claim that, arriving from a night out, they had to put all of their clothes in the washing machine and scrape the “smoke” off their skin in the shower. There are even those that claim they are “allergic” to tobacco smoke. Yet there are no allergens (proteins) in tobacco smoke to be allergic to.
And it didn’t stop with just the smoke. Cigarette butts – heretofore unheard of – suddenly became a “monumental problem” too – akin to improvised explosive devices, requiring drastic action. These are all recent phenomena born of toxic propaganda; it is an expanding hysteria. It says nothing about the physical properties/propensities of tobacco smoke. These people are demonstrating that they have been successfully conditioned (brainwashed) into aversion. They are now suffering mental dysfunction such as anxiety disorder, hypochondria, or somatization. Typical symptoms of anxiety disorder are heart palpitations, chest tightness, shortness of breath, headache, dizziness, etc. These capnophobics (smokephobics) are no different to those irrationally attempting to avoid cracks in the pavement lest their mental world come crashing down. Questionable social engineering requires putting many into mental disorder to advance the ideological/financial agenda. It’s the antismoking fanatics/zealots/extremists and their toxic mentality and propaganda that have long been in need of urgent scrutiny
Our home economics teacher used to smoke .
In fact I remember one particular day and she smoked half the hurling team .
Now it is primary schools lol…
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