Holy smoke! It will now cost €20 for a pack of cigarettes?

It’s hard to convey to anyone aged under 30 today how much cigarette smoke used to play a part in everyday life.

Getting the bus into work? Smoke wafting over you from the fella sparking up in the seat behind.

In the office? By noon, a pall of smoke often hung in mid-air, like dawn the day after the Battle of the Somme.

Fancy a pint after work? The haze in the bar would be so bad that you would occasionally choke and your eyes would water.

Everybody smoked then, including the non-smokers, in a sense, who would inhale the stuff passively and retch at the smell of it on their clothes, which they only noticed when they got home after a night out. The smokers probably never noticed at all.

This was an era, late in the last century, when the idea of a set place just for smokers seemed nonsensical. The airlines did eventually shove all the smokers to the rear seats of plane cabins, while the hostesses went about the business of flogging boxes of 200 duty free cigarettes to passengers (even the non-smokers would buy them, as invariably a smoking friend would call in a favour).

Of course, this all sounds disgusting in these enlightened times, even to those who used to be nicotine addicts back then. A cohort that includes me.

I was what used to be laughably called a social smoker, meaning I only sparked up a fag when I could breathe it into other people’s faces at close proximity.

I started the habit at about 12 because, you know, cool, and by my late teens could easily get through a packet of 20 on a boozy night out.

I smoked at work because I was hooked by then, and also because I thought it was what journalists did at the desk in between trips to the pub. My ashtray was an old and, hopefully, decommissioned World War I shell given to me once by an old soldier I interviewed.

I smoked like that trooper all through my twenties, and quit when I got to 30. It just seemed the right thing to do. Sorry, addicts, but I found it quite easy too. Just do it.

It was a good time to kick the habit as smokers were, by then, becoming pariahs. Workplace bans and public transport came first, then pubs and restaurants. The smokers were being driven out of polite society as the era of health-and-safety arrived.

A decade ago, the politicians even banned adults from smoking in vehicles when children are inside - eminently sensible, of course, although I gather not a single person has ever been prosecuted for that.

The onslaught continues. Ireland is now looking at bringing in a generational ban on smoking, after the UK brought in a law making it illegal to sell tobacco to anyone born on or after January 1, 2009, a policy that obviously will have an effect as the years roll by.

The aim is to gradually phase out smoking from the population until, eventually, by the end of the century, only centenarians will be able to buy cigarettes, presumably displaying their telegram from the President at the till to ensure they get served.

Smokers have literally been a dying breed ever since the 1950s, when scientists first discovered the dangers, and although it took 50 years for the message to get across, numbers have dwindled steadily down the decades.

In fact, I was surprised to discover that 13% of Irish people still indulge in a drag every day, and among men that rises to one in five.

That 13% equates to around half a million people.

The question I have for them, with the Government set to raise the cost of a packet of 20 cigarettes to €20 in the budget next week, is how on earth can you afford it?

Ciggies have always been heavily taxed, but back in my day, in the 1990s, 20 of them cost around £2.50, and you could get a packet of ten for £1.

They did away with the 10-packet option almost 20 years ago, to make tobacco less affordable and accessible for young people, but even a decade ago, 20 cigarettes were still on sale for around a tenner.

By next week, that will have doubled - with 83% of the cost going into the state coffers.

Let’s do some maths here that may change the minds of some of those half a million last-gasp addicts.

The average smoker burns through around a dozen cigarettes a day - so let’s call it a tenner a day habit. That’s €70 a week, or around €300 a month. Yikes! Three and a half grand a year going up in smoke.

Think how many vapes you could get for that? (Only joking, though the number of vapers is currently 8%, and some day soon that will surely surpass the numbers smoking in the old-fashioned way.)

There is unlikely to be much sympathy for the smokers when the latest tax rise is announced by Simon Harris and Jack Chambers on Tuesday, hitting the €20-a-packet ceiling. But, as a former smoker, I will feel a little bit sorry for them.

For some, the latest rise could be the straw that breaks the Camel smoker’s back (do they still sell that brand?!) It could signal the end of perhaps one of life’s last remaining pleasures for half a million people.

We live in healthier times, and nobody would want to revisit that smoke-addled era. Even so, I worry about the direction of our puritanical times, as personified by the likes of clean-cut Harris and Chambers, and our health-conscious Taoiseach, who famously brought in the smoking ban in pubs in 2004.

Micheál Martin drinks green tea, he doesn’t eat chips or toast, and we recently learned that he hasn’t eaten a biscuit in 30 years. Shamefully, my record stands at 30 minutes.

And well done him.

But I do think there is a place for the grit in the Irish oyster; the old girl who likes the odd smoke and a gossip over a coffee, the fella and his pint of plain. They live among us, but I really don’t think anybody cares for them any more.

One day soon, they will all be gone in a puff of smoke.