"This Abominable Evil Is the Source of Fetid Corruption": The IRA's 1920 War on Poitín

Abstract

"This Abominable Evil Is the Source of Fetid Corruption":The IRA's 1920 War on Poitín Caoimhín de Barra (bio) As the Irish Republican Army waged war on crown forces during the Irish War of Independence, British control of large parts of Ireland collapsed. The escalating conflict was a boon for those who could profit from the slackening of law and order, especially those in the business of illegal distillation. This raised a dilemma for republican paramilitaries. Fighting a guerilla campaign against an enemy with significant advantages in terms of financing and equipment, the IRA could scarcely afford to divert resources toward combating the poitín trade in the Irish countryside. Yet it did. In fact, the second half of 1920 witnessed a serious campaign in which local IRA commanders, acting on their own initiative, sought to destroy the illicit-whiskey trade. Over the following six months IRA poitín raids took place across the north, west, and south, with stills seized in Kerry, Galway, Mayo, Sligo, Donegal, Tyrone, Cavan, Monaghan, Antrim, and Armagh. Exactly how many such operations took place is difficult to ascertain. After all, members of an illegal organization searching for fellow lawbreakers engaged in criminality was not the kind of activity that generated exhaustively detailed written records. But based on newspaper reports and witness statements, a conservative estimate is that the Irish Volunteers conducted about one hundred such raids in the second half of 1920. Some of these operations could be quite extensive. One raid at Ballyscally in Tyrone involved thirty men, while a report in the Anglo-Celt claimed (possibly with some exaggeration) that the seizure of a still at a farmer's house at Ture in Monaghan included between two and three hundred participants.1 An article in [End Page 283] the Sligo Champion described a series of poitín raids in the townland of Masshill, reporting that: It is rumoured that about forty men were engaged, and that the operations were carried out in real military style. Sentries and outposts were thrown out. A line of communication was kept up between the raiding party and the outposts by means of dispatch riders and signaling with cycle lamps. The orders were given to the men through a megaphone, and the houses to be raided were approached and surrounded without the least noise.2 This scene naturally raises some questions. Why was the IRA engaged in this kind of activity at all? We also might wonder what was the reaction of the ordinary men and women of Ireland, the people on whose behalf the Irish Volunteers claimed to be fighting, to the effort to stamp out poitín distillation. Why did the crusade against "mountain dew" stop as abruptly as it started, and what insight does it offer into the vision of a new Ireland that these revolutionaries had? The IRA was motivated by a number of factors. Firstly, as an entity dedicated to overthrowing the system, the IRA was committed to a new society, and for many of them alcohol's place needed to be tempered. Secondly, the IRA understood that suppressing poitín had public-relations potential. After all, it wanted the Irish public to recognize the IRA as the legal authority on the island, and what better way to demonstrate its fitness to rule than holding illicit-whiskey distillers to account? Thirdly, as the Catholic church was also morally opposed to poitín, the IRA hoped that tackling the manufacture and distribution of moonshine would reinforce the sense that it was doing God's work. Hence the Irish Volunteers often displayed the captured tools of the trade, such as stills and worms, on church grounds on Sundays. The topic of poitín and the IRA during the War of Independence has received very little attention. In Michael Hopkinson's The Irish War of Independence and Charles Townshend's The Republic: The Fight for Irish Freedom, for example, poitín is barely mentioned at all, with both books dedicating only a sentence to it.3 John Borganovo is [End Page 284] similarly brief when broaching the topic in his recent essay "Peasant Resistance Traditions and the Irish...