As smoking ban looms, business moves North

Hotels on the border, from County Louth in the east to County Donegal in the north, are reporting huge losses in trade to Northern competitors. With the ban on smoking in the workplace to finally come into effect next week, publicans are anticipating that they will be next to lose out.
Hotel owners have been reporting dramatic falloffs in bookings for social functions since last fall, when Health Minister Micheal Martin announced the ban.
The Irish Cigarette Machine Operators’ Association highlighted its dissatisfaction with the Southern authorities last week when it announced that it would be holding its annual conference in Newry, just north of the border.
The group, which traditionally holds its conference in the South, represents 120 cigarette vending machine businesses and claims many of them will be forced out of business by the ban. The group decided to hold its meeting in Newry’s Canal Court Hotel, which has benefited in recent months from a major increase in bookings for conferences and wedding receptions. Many of the bookings are at the expense of its Southern competitors.
The controversial Irish ban will encourage more people to eat out rather than turn them away, according to a report commissioned by the Office of Tobacco Control.
But Irish bar owners are acutely aware of the complaints from New York owners and staff that the smoking ban was indeed bad for business.
Tadg O’Sullivan, chief executive of the Vintners’ Federation of Ireland, criticized the report and said health minister Michael Martin should introduce certain waivers.
“This is crystal ball gazing and ignores the fact that independent research carried out in New York has shown a massive reduction in the pub business there,” he said.
The northward migration echoes the arrival of the New York City smoking ban in March 2003, when for a few months bars just outside the city’s borders — on McLean Avenue, just over the Bronx/Westchester border, for example — attracted business from smokers avoiding the city ban. A New York statewide ban put an end to the discrepancy in July 2003.
The Federation of Retail Licensed Trade in the North anticipates that its members will benefit from the new legislation.
Several bus companies in border areas are also planning to bring drinkers across the border by bus, while a number of pub owners are reported to have closed their premises and moved north.
FRLT chief executive Nicola Jamison said the federation’s members were actively looking at ways to maximize takings in the immediate aftermath of the ban.
“Our members around the border are looking at strategies to maximize their takings. I know that some pubs are organizing buses for Southern customers,” Jamison said. “While we have every sympathy for our Southern colleagues, customer demand is such that our members will benefit from the ban.”
The federation has been liaising with its Southern counterpart, the
Vintners’ Federation of Ireland, in a bid to fend off a similar ban in the North.
It is proposing that its members implement a “clean-air” policy, similar to the compromise put forward by the vintners.
Last year, the Irish Hospitality Industry Alliance warned that the ban could sound the death knell for many pubs and “ballrooms of romance” in the border regions.
But various cancer awareness charities have said the smoking ban is a major step in reducing lung cancer rates.
In Northern Ireland, the Ulster Cancer Foundation wants a workplace-smoking ban similar to the one coming into effect south of the border. But the UK government has so far resisted calls to introduce a ban on smoking in public places.
Gerry McElwee of the charity said such a ban would save hundreds of lives every year in Northern Ireland.
“There is some resistance, not from the vast majority of the population but from vested interests to policies that would regulate smoking,” he said.
Lung cancer is Northern Ireland’s biggest cancer killer, with 850 people diagnosed each year.