Drink and society in twentieth-century Ireland

Abstract

This chapter examines debates, controversies and trends in relation to the consumption of alcoholic drink in twentieth-century Ireland, and explores the difficulties and ambiguities associated with characterising the consumption of alcohol in Ireland and defining the Irish drinking culture during this period. In doing so, it includes reflections on drunkenness, temperance, alcoholism, licensing legislation, the drinks industry, the impact of the Catholic Church, the extent to which debate about alcohol was gendered and the role of alcohol in stereotyping Irish identity. Numerous examples of the range of social, political and cultural comment on Irish alcohol consumption are cited, and the chapter also looks at the connections between alcohol consumption and the economy, the impact of modernisation on consumption and the range of alcoholic drinks consumed, and the difficulties associated with alcohol consumption statistics and the comparative analysis of moderate and excessive drinking. Introduction In June 1949, on one of the hottest days of the summer, 80,000 members of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association (PTAA) crammed into the Gaelic Athletic Association stadium at Croke Park in Dublin for the golden jubilee celebrations of the PTAA. By that stage the PTAA was the largest Catholic lay association in the Irish Republic with an estimated membership of 500,000. Established in 1898 its members took a pledge to abstain from alcohol (what was termed a ‘heroic offering’) in devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The Croke Park celebrations in 1949 provoked the ire of the brilliant writer and alcoholic Flann O’Brien, who lambasted members of the PTAA for bringing Dublin City to a standstill by taking over its transport network in order, as he saw it, to parade their piety. In his Irish Times column published a day after the event, he remarked: Dublin’s working man with his wife or four children intent on spending a day at the seaside does not have to journey to Croke Park to prove that he is not a slave to whiskey. If he can manage a pint of porter a day it is the best he can do . . . I can call nothing comparable to yesterday’s * Author’s e-mail: diarmaid.ferriter@ucd.ie doi: 10.3318/PRIAC.2015.115.08 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy Vol. 115C, 349 369 # 2015 Royal Irish Academy This content downloaded from 207.46.13.39 on Sat, 08 Oct 2016 06:02:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms procedure and I hope somebody will examine the legality of it. If the abstainers are entitled to disrupt transport in their own peculiar and selfish interest, there is in our democratic mode no reason in the world why the drinking men of Ireland should not demand and be given the same right. Let everybody stay at home because the boozers are in town! I would advise these Pioneer characters that there is more in life than the bottle, that fair play to others is important and that temperance*taking the word in its big and general value*is a thing they might strive to cultivate a bit better. The PTAA rally and O’Brien’s response to it underlined some aspects of Ireland’s tortured relationship with alcohol by the middle of the twentieth century, and the difficulty of finding a middle ground with regard to its consumption. In the same year writer John D. Sheridan depicted the dilemma of the moderate drinker in such a country. Moderate consumers of alcohol, he suggested: resent the sneers of the heavy drinker*that prince of bigots*who looks down on us as cute, penny-watching apron-slaves, and is forever trying to raise us to his mighty stature. Our case against the total abstainer is not so easy to put into words, since we envy his high motives and admire his self-control, but we think it unfair that we who carry the heavier end of the cross should be denied a share of the halo. I The contributions of O’Brien and Sheridan regarding the place of alcohol in Irish society were a continuation of debates that had been aired, spasmodically, for over a century. The Capuchin friar Fr Theobald Mathew (Fig. 1) made a considerable impact with his temperance crusade in the late 1830s*estimates of the number of pledges administered during his dominance vary from 700,000 to over 2 million*reflecting the transition from moderation to teetotal in mid1830s temperance societies, a departure which was accompanied by increased working-class involvement. The Fr Mathew episode highlighted the relative ease with which a temperance crusade could be transformed into a temporary mass movement, but it also exposed a multitude of difficulties, including indifference on the part of the Catholic hierarchy and hostility from Protestants. Its link with nationalist politics and the failure to establish a national structure to provide durable foundations for the future of the movement were also problematic. 1 Irish Times, 27 June 1949. 2 Diarmaid Ferriter, A nation of extremes: the pioneers in twentieth century Ireland, 2nd edn (Dublin, 2008), 207. 3 Colm Kerrigan, Father Mathew and the Irish Temperance Movement (Cork, 1992), 80. See also Paul A. Townsend, Father Mathew, temperance and Irish identity (Dublin, 2002), 260 89. Diarmaid Ferriter