Piping up yesterday about a Europe-wide smoking ban in public places was EU health commissioner, David Byrne. His suggestion - to use worker safety legislation to ban smoking in cafes, bars and restaurants throughout the 15-member European Union - deserves to be heard. Many will ask Mr Byrne to lighten up about lighting up, but his concerns are real and founded on the innumerable studies which show secondhand smoke is linked to two big killers in the western world: heart disease and cancer.
More than 100 US cities, most notably New York this year, have already banned smoking in public places. True, prohibition has been accompanied by much gnashing of nicotine-stained teeth, but the fuming has ended not long after the puffing. This does not make it any easier for governments and bureaucrats to enact smoking bans, which are often seen by those addicted to nicotine as unnecessarily draconian. In Britain - where polls show a majority of people would accept restrictions in restaurants, pubs and work - the chief medical officer supports a blanket ban on smoking in public, while his boss, health minister John Reid, has indicated he does not. The Irish government's attempts to push through a ban could go up in smoke as public support drains away and ministers appear split over the medical benefits.
But lives are at stake - that is why Europe's policymakers have decided they need to restrict people's freedoms. Such steps do not mean that adults, in the privacy of their own home, cannot take a drag on a fag. No doubt critics, especially Europhobes, will want to portray Mr Byrne's intervention as a particularly virulent strain of an European disease: overregulation. It is not. Instead the European commissioner has extended the logic of previous EU anti-smoking measures. Of course, any clampdown will inevitably see people driven outside nightclubs and bars - congesting pavements and scattering cigarette detritus by doorways. Such unpleasantness is unattractive, but not as unattractive as the health risks associated with being shrouded in a haze of tobacco smoke.
