temperance and total abstinence

temperance and total abstinence. The first substantial temperance societies were established in Ireland in 1829, mainly inspired by the successes of the anti‐spirits movement in the United States. The increasing consumption of whiskey, particularly illicit whiskey or poteen, among all classes had been causing considerable alarm in Ireland since the 1790s and temperance societies were seen as a way of countering this trend.

The first societies were directed against spirit drinking among the upper classes and were supported by the clergy, especially Belfast Presbyterians, by members of the Dublin professional elite, by Quakers, and by a handful of evangelical landlords. In the face of serious economic dislocation and agrarian protest after 1815, and of Daniel O'Connell's successful campaign for Catholic emancipation during the 1820s, temperance offered the Protestant ascendancy a means of proving its superiority and of thereby bolstering its status during a challenging period.

Temperance did not become a major popular movement in Ireland until total abstinence was introduced from England in 1835 and Fr. Theobald Mathew (1790–1856), a Capuchin from Cork, took up the teetotal cause early in 1838. Fr. Mathew's crusade was a phenomenal success: by 1841–2 perhaps 5 million people, out of a total population of 8.2 million, had taken the teetotal pledge. The crusade was supported by the Catholic urban middle class and by radical Protestants, who saw it as a reforming and modernizing force. Yet most of its adherents were poor rural Catholics and their motives for joining are harder to unravel. A desire for economic and social betterment was certainly important, but Fr. Mathew was endowed in the popular mind with miraculous powers. The crusade was also therefore an expression of the popular religious beliefs and millenarian fantasies that characterized Ireland in the decades before the Famine.

O'Connell took the pledge himself in 1840 and it would seem that the startling success of Fr. Mathew's crusade served to encourage him to establish the Repeal Association in the same year. Indeed the repeal movement benefited in a variety of ways from the crusade, making use of temperance bands and reading rooms, to say nothing of a sober population when it came to organizing the monster meetings of 1843.

Although many priests and the majority of the hierarchy supported the crusade, Fr. Mathew was a controversial figure within his own church. His interpretation of the teetotal pledge as a sacred vow, his mismanagement of crusade finances, his friendships with Protestants, and his acceptance of a government pension in 1847, all helped alienate many of his fellow clergy.

After the Famine and the swift decline of teetotalism, the Catholic church showed little enthusiasm for another such crusade. The hierarchy favoured temperance over teetotalism and it was not until the 1890s that another significant total abstinence movement emerged within the church. This was the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association of the Sacred Heart, established in Dublin in 1898–1901 by a Jesuit, Fr. James Cullen (1841–1921).

As its name implies, the Pioneer Association was an elitist devotional organization, not a populist crusade. It did not aspire to a mass following, nor did it aim to reclaim drunkards. The Pioneers were to be small bands of devoted Catholics, setting an example of piety and asceticism for others. Yet the success of the Pioneers far exceeded Cullen's expectations. By the 1920s the association had some 300,000 members and today it remains one of the largest temperance organizations in the world.

Temperance continued to be influential among Protestants after the Famine. In Ulster, Presbyterians, Methodists, and other dissenters increasingly practised total abstinence, to the extent that wine was banished from the communion service in most churches. Protestants were also active in various temperance societies which campaigned vigorously from the 1850s onwards for anti‐drink legislation. Sunday closing was introduced in the five main Irish cities in 1878, but with the rise of the home rule party from the 1870s, strongly supported by the drink trade, the political base of the Irish temperance movement was severely eroded.

Yet temperance has remained a significant force in both Northern Ireland and the Republic. Although the Republic has long derived a substantial portion of its revenue from taxes on the country's large brewing and distilling industries, it was nevertheless estimated in the late 1970s that some 20 per cent of the adult population were total abstainers. Teetotalism is also strong in the north and during the Stormont regime (1921–72) the temperance movement succeeded in achieving total Sunday closing and rigorous enforcement of the licensing laws.

Bibliography

Kerrigan, C. , Father Mathew and the Irish Temperance Movement, 1838–49 (1992)
Malcolm, E. L. , ‘Ireland Sober, Ireland Free’: Drink and Temperance in Nineteenth‐Century Ireland (1986)

Elizabeth Malcolm