And what will Damien Hirst do?

Today's Wall Street Journal has an article (subs. req'd) about a recurring example of what's often viewed as European Union directives gone mad -- the likelihood of a ban on the use of formaldehyde, used to preserve corpses for Irish wakes. Irish undertakers certainly have a massive reservoir of cultural reference points that they can deploy:

A 1998 EU law called the Biocides Directive requires the funeral industry to pay for expensive health and safety studies to prove that formaldehyde doesn't cause cancer among embalmers. "We are fighting the thing tooth and nail," says Adrian Haler, managing director of the U.K. subsidiary of the Dodge Company, the leading supplier of embalming fluids to funeral homes in the U.S.

Thus, a few months ago, the company's Mr. Haler, Mr. Nichols and other Irish funeral directors traveled to EU headquarters in Brussels to lobby for their cultural heritage exemption. Mr. Nichols is no ordinary arbiter of Irishness: His 192-year-old family business makes an appearance in the novel "Ulysses," when James Joyce's protagonist, Leopold Bloom, walks past the red-brick funeral home.

The EU has until 2010 to decide on any ban. The "EU directive will put embalmers out of business and cause decaying corpses to go to funerals," Neil Parish, a British conservative member of the European Parliament, says on his Web site. Britain's Daily Telegraph recently picked up the torch, exhorting: "Don't Bury Our Wake: The EU Is Picking a Fight It Cannot Hope to Win If It Tries to End the Irish Way of Death."

The Brussels-bashing exasperates EU officials, who say they're just trying to force industries generally to switch to less-toxic chemicals when possible. "We are not trying to sound the death knell for the Irish wake," says Barbara Helfferich, a spokeswoman for the European Commission's environmental directorate. "It certainly doesn't mean that caskets must be slammed shut."

Embalmers are skeptical about the less toxic alternatives but one is left with the impression that Brussels is up against a well organised lobby that has skillfully exploited a public sense of an overweening European Commission to be able to keep doing things the way it's always done them, progress be damned.

UPDATE: Here's what's involved in working with formaldehyde, courtesy of the aforementioned Hirst.