Temperance Movements

The government first criticized the level of whiskey consumption in Ireland as early as the 1550s, and state efforts to control the sale of drink through licensing laws began in the 1630s. By the 1790s the Irish parliament was voicing considerable concern at the quantities of illegal whiskey, known as poteen, being produced and sold in illicit drink shops, known as shebeens. Despite such long-standing complaints, an organized temperance movement did not appear in Ireland until the 1820s. Societies were established in Belfast and Dublin in 1829 by Protestant clergy, doctors, and merchants. Following the example of the influential U.S. temperance movement, these societies campaigned against drinking spirits and encouraged moderate consumption of other forms of alcohol. In 1835 total-abstinence societies reached Ireland from England, although some temperance advocates resisted this innovation.

Whether in the form of temperance or teetotalism, however, the antidrink movement at first made little headway since it was viewed in Ireland as foreign, fanatical, and a front for Protestant proselytization—which indeed to a large extent it was. But when an obscure Cork Capuchin named Father Theobald Mathew (1790–1856) joined a local teetotal society in 1838, the campaign took off spectacularly. By 1841 Mathew was claiming to have administered some five million abstinence pledges at a time when the total Irish population was a little over eight million.

Historians have debated why so many flocked to take the pledge from Mathew. H. F. Kearney, writing in 1979, suggested that the crusade was the product of modernizing, urban groups, but Elizabeth Malcolm countered in 1986 by stressing its roots in rural millenarian expectations, with Mathew being perceived as a messianic figure heralding the restoration of the Catholic ascendancy in Ireland. In 1992 Colm Kerrigan, while acknowledging that popular beliefs played a role in the crusade's success, followed Kearney in characterizing it as forward-looking rather than backward-looking. Further studies appearing in 2002 by Paul Townend and J. F. Quinn offered differing interpretations. Townend in particular saw the crusade as an indication of the prefamine Catholic Church's failure to meet the spiritual needs of the Irish people. All agreed, however, that the crusade's success was short-lived; even before the Great Famine, a serious decline had begun. Mathew's opposition to repeal, his financial and administrative incompetence, and the hostility of some of the Catholic hierarchy undermined the movement. After the Great Famine, Mathew's crusade was widely perceived, not least by the Catholic Church, to have failed. The church therefore decided to promote temperance rather than total abstinence and to do so through church organizations rather than through secular temperance societies.

Meanwhile, Protestant-dominated societies, which were especially strong in Ulster, continued to operate, but in the wake of Mathew's failure they switched from trying to curb the drinking of individuals through persuasion to imposing restrictions on society through legislation. Most favored prohibition. When it became clear that this was unlikely to be passed by the British parliament, they campaigned for measures like Sunday closing (the total closure of pubs on the Sabbath), local option (communities having the power to vote to exclude pubs from their neighborhoods), and more rigorous enforcement of the licensing laws. Some limited successes were achieved, such as the introduction of Sunday closing outside the major cities in 1878. But with the demise of the Irish Liberal Party in the 1870s, the temperance movement was deprived of a solid political base in Ireland. The Home Rule Party had close links with the drink industry, as did the British Conservative Party, with which most Ulster Unionist MPs were affiliated. As the issues of land and sovereignty came to the fore of Irish politics in the 1880s, the temperance question declined in significance.

The Catholic Church, however, revived the issue of teetotalism in the 1880s, culminating in 1898 with the establishment by the Jesuit Father James Cullen (1841–1921) of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association of the Sacred Heart. The Pioneers quickly became the most influential temperance organization in the country, and they remained so throughout the twentieth century. By 1925 the Pioneers claimed to have 250,000 members in Ireland; by 1945, close to 350,000 members; and by 1960 (when the population of the Republic was less than three million), 500,000 members. At the same time there were also thousands of members in Britain, the United States, South America, Australia, and various parts of Africa. By the middle of the twentieth century the Pioneer Association was arguably the largest temperance society in the world.

The Pioneers were more than just a temperance society, and their complex character ultimately proved to be problematical. Father Cullen believed that Father Mathew had failed because his crusade did not have the support of the Catholic Church and was poorly organized. Cullen therefore laid down very precise rules for the Pioneers and structured the association as a pious sodality dedicated to the Sacred Heart rather than as a secular welfare organization. He saw the association's agenda as primarily personal and spiritual, not social and ameliorative. This made it difficult for the Pioneers to engage in political lobbying. Thus they could not persuade the new Free State to introduce more draconian licensing legislation in the 1920s (although temperance groups in Northern Ireland had considerable success in this regard), nor were they able to prevent the Fianna Fáil government from ending Sunday closing in 1959. The Pioneers' impressive growth in membership during the 1950s was in fact outstripped by per capita alcohol consumption, which increased by 60 percent between 1948 and 1970.

By the 1960s, with the emergence of new approaches to problem drinking and new organizations, the Pioneers were beginning to appear decidedly oldfashioned. Alcoholics Anonymous reached Ireland in 1946, and the view that alcoholism was a disease, not a moral or religious failing, gained ground in the 1950s. In such a climate of opinion, prayers and hellfire sermons, pledge taking, and the display of Pioneer pins all seemed inappropriate. Some investigators of Irish drinking practices in the 1970s even went so far as to suggest that the puritanical and authoritarian nature of Irish Catholicism, which the Pioneers very much represented, promoted rather than discouraged heavy drinking. At the end of the twentieth century the Pioneer Association remained a significant and distinctive expression of traditional Irish Catholic piety, but the belief that such an organization could transform Irish drinking habits had long since evaporated.

SEE ALSO Church of Ireland: Since 1690; Evangelicalism and Revivals; Methodism; Presbyterianism; Religious Orders: Men; Roman Catholic Church: 1829 to 1891; Roman Catholic Church: Since 1891; Sodalities and Confraternities

Bibliography

Ferriter, Diarmaid. A Nation of Extremes: The Pioneers in Twentieth-Century Ireland. 1999.

Kearney, H. F. "Fr Mathew: Apostle of Modernisation." In Studies in Irish History Presented to R. Dudley Edwards, edited by Art Cosgrove and Donal McCartney. 1979.

Kerrigan, Colm. Father Mathew and the Irish Temperance Movement, 1838–1849. 1992.

Malcolm, Elizabeth. "Ireland Sober, Ireland Free": Drink and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century Ireland. 1986

Quinn, J. F. Father Mathew's Crusade: Temperance in Nineteenth-Century Ireland and Irish America. 2002.

Stivers, Richard. A Hair of the Dog: Irish Drinking and American Stereotype. 1976.

Townend, Paul A. Father Mathew, Temperance and Irish Identity. 2002.

Elizabeth Malcolm