Since the start of this year’s somewhat underwhelming summer, here follows a partial list of things that the Irish Government has either introduced bans on, or talked about banning:
There is no doubt that we have, in compiling this list, forgotten something. It is also notable that the above list goes back simply to the beginning of the summer, and does not take into account all of the other bans and regulations introduced under this Government, from minimum unit alcohol pricing to the notion that said Alcohol must be fenced off in Supermarkets.
I was speaking, recently, to somebody in the vape industry and asked them how much the flavour ban would impact their sales. “A little”, this person said, “but there’s no law on this planet that can prevent me from selling somebody a bottle of flavourless vape juice, and also selling them a bottle of strawberry flavouring – both of those will remain legal products”.
The same thing, of course, goes for advertising bans. Television viewers in recent years may have noticed that alcohol companies are now very eager to market the non-alcoholic version of their drinks, with products like Guinness Zero and Peroni Nastro Azzuro 0% now commanding significant airtime, in large part because the companies behind them have realised that it’s a way to promote their brand image while circumventing regulations on advertising alcohol. Gambling companies, no doubt, will manage the same thing.
Nor is it any coincidence that the dynamic pricing of concert tickets followed legislation under the previous government designed to regulate ticket touting and concert price gouging. Governments legislate, and market actors find loopholes. It has ever been thus, and it ever shall be.
What’s particularly striking about Ireland, however, is the sheer extent of the banning spree, and how it coincides with an era where the Irish Government faces intractable problems that it cannot solve. And one might reasonably fear that things are not being banned because bans on them are necessary, but simply because bans on them are easy to announce and legislate for in an era when Government seems to find it impossible to deliver any meaningful legislation on housing, or health, or crime, or immigration.
There’s a second, more depressing problem: That Government is not only doing this because they are obsessively controlling ninnies without an original idea in their heads, but also because banning things, Irish politicians have discovered, is good politics. The result is a society that is increasingly intolerant and increasingly illiberal.
It would be very helpful if we had just one liberal politician or liberal political party whose default assumption was that most things should not be banned: Who argued for the traditional merits of live and let live, and the old principle that that which harms only the user should have the presumption of legality.
Indeed, that instinct is not quite dead, just warped into utter perversion: It has to be one of the most bizarre situations ever to have developed, for example, that Ireland has more than a few politicians who favour banning and regulating vape juice flavours, and who also favour decriminalising the use of Cannabis and who also would vote in favour of euthanasia and the legalisation of prostitution. Objectively, one might think euthanasia a more harmful activity to the person than puffing on a butterscotch flavoured vape in the privacy of one’s own home, yet the trend in Irish politics is towards legalising the former and banning the latter.
Indeed, there are many in Irish politics who would regard a young woman selling sexual access to her body as a legal transaction between consenting adults, but who would regard that very same young woman selling a disposable vape to an adult as a matter worthy of criminal investigation.
The same trend, evidently, applies towards speech and underpins both the rationale for, and the many problems with, the troubled hate speech legislation. That too, we can safely assume, would ban speech we do not like, while applying not at all to other arguably more harmful speech. Consider, for example, which of the two following statements is more likely to be prosecuted for inciting hatred towards a vulnerable and marginalised group? Person A saying “I think migrants have a duty to go back and help their own countries rather than being a burden on this one”, or Person B saying “I think elderly people have a duty to consider assisted suicide rather than becoming a burden on the state’s healthcare system”.
When you look at the trends in Ireland regarding what is to be legal, and what is to be banned, you begin to see the outlines – growing ever sharper – of what amounts to a tyranny of the progressive mind, where there is no animating principle beyond “everybody should think and behave like us”.
As a life-long conservative, I am perhaps not the best advocate for liberalism – but many of us who were told we lived in a liberal society might have hoped at least that liberal principles might apply within it – principles like “people should have as much personal choice and freedom as the state can afford them”.
Yet that is not quite what we got, is it? We got a Government and a society that is both institutionally incompetent on the big problems, and institutionally tyrannical on the small stuff. As the Government prepares its latest ban, Harvey Sherratt’s mum watches her son struggling to breathe.
It’s a rotten combination, and any competent electorate would be infuriated by it.