Galway Pub Allows Smoking Despite Ban

DUBLIN, Ireland – A lone Galway pub has thrown down the gauntlet to the Irish government over its 3-month-old ban on workplace smoking – by inviting customers to rebel and light up.

“We’re taking a stand,” declared Ciaran Levanzin, co-owner of the Fibber Magee’s pub in the central Eyre Square of Galway, where ashtrays returned to tables Tuesday and customers were encouraged to puff away.

It marked the first deliberate effort by any of Ireland’s more than 10,000 pubs to defy the ban. The measure has been almost universally observed – and, in a country where 70 percent of adults do not smoke, broadly popular – since its March 29 introduction.

However, Fibber Magee’s rebellion proved hugely popular in Galway, a bustling university city famed for its night life.

As RTE, Ireland’s state broadcasters, reported live outside the pub Tuesday night that the place was “absolutely crammed with drinkers and smokers,” a huge roar of approval could be heard from the crowd inside watching the news.

Levanzin said he had already been obliged to lay off a third of his workers since the ban came into force. He said more than half of the pub’s previous customers had been smokers.

“Why do this? Because we’re going out of business. We might as well go out with a puff of smoke,” he said.

Health Minister Micheal Martin led the push for the ban, arguing that anybody employed in enclosed workplaces should not be exposed to cancer-causing smoke. The move – the first by any nation – was modeled on similar measures imposed in California, New York City and more than a dozen other U.S. cities.

Inspectors from the government-appointed Western Health Board stopped by Fibber Magee’s and warned the pub’s other co-owner, Ronan Lawless, they could face a $3,700 fine and, eventually, the loss of their liquor license.

But Lawless said such punishment, if it comes to that, wouldn’t matter.

“With the smoking ban, our business was going down the tubes anyway. We’ve no option but to invite our smoking customers back and see what happens,” he said.

The Vintners Federation of Ireland, which represents more than 6,000 pub owners, said Tuesday that business nationwide had fallen by 15 percent to 25 percent since the ban and predicted worse would come.

“Many small, rural, family-owned pubs have been hit particularly hard since the introduction of the ban and have serious concerns for their livelihoods and the future of their staff,” said the federation president, Seamus O’Donoghue, who also runs a pub in the midlands market town of Portlaoise. “Once the summer season ends and the weather worsens, further loss of business is inevitable.”

Hundreds of pubs have bought gazebos, screens and outdoor heaters to create new smoking areas outdoors, because only enclosed workplaces are covered by the ban. It’s quickly become common to see gaggles of shivering smokers chatting, pint in hand, outside roadside pubs at night.