The Half Sober Nation

Two facts about Ireland, both true, and they do not sit together.

A quarter of Irish adults drank no alcohol at all in the past year. That is a higher rate of abstention than England or Scotland.

And Ireland ranks eighth in the world, out of one hundred and ninety four countries, for how often its drinkers drink heavily in a single sitting.

So the country is neither the drunken Ireland of the stereotype nor the sober one of the pledge. It is both at once, and it has been for a very long time. That is what this series is about.

1838. A friar and a Quaker

The movement began in Cork in April 1838, and it began with two men who should not have been working together.

William Martin was a Quaker. He had been pressing the cause for years and getting nowhere, because the people he needed to reach were Catholic and he was not.

Theobald Mathew was a Capuchin friar with twenty years among the poor of Cork behind him. He had built industrial schools and benefit societies and bought a botanic garden to turn it into a burial ground open to every denomination.

Martin asked him, repeatedly. Mathew signed the pledge at a public meeting in Cork in April 1838, and the words attributed to him are the plainest in the whole story.

Here goes in the name of God.

Inside nine months a hundred and fifty thousand names were on the books.

1839. What Ireland was actually drinking

Put a number on the thing he set out to stop.

In 1839 Ireland cleared 12,296,000 gallons of spirits for consumption, and the Crown collected £1,434,573 in duty on it.

That is the baseline. Set it aside for a moment, because the interesting part is what happened to it.

1842. It worked

By 1842 the figure was 6,485,443 gallons. The duty had fallen to £864,725.

The national consumption of spirits had roughly halved in three years. [1]

Nothing else in Irish social history moves a number like that. No law, no famine, no war did it. A friar and a pledge did it, and the evidence is not in a memoir or a sermon but in the Crown's own excise returns, which had every reason to be accurate and no reason at all to flatter him.

1843. O'Connell's policemen

Daniel O'Connell was at that moment gathering crowds for Repeal of the Union at a scale no police force in Ireland could have handled.

He knew where the discipline came from. He called Mathew's movement a mighty miracle, and said he would never have held his monster meetings without the teetotallers as his policemen.

Read that carefully. Not a sober audience. Stewards. The only organised, disciplined, sworn body of men available to a constitutional nationalist was a temperance society.

Mathew wanted no part of it. He avoided political questions entirely, and contemporaries noticed. The traffic ran one way.

The crowd numbers are another matter, and they are the weakest thing in the whole tradition. A million at Tara is newspaper arithmetic. Historians who have gone back to the sources call the contemporary figures grossly inflated and note there is almost nothing to check them against. [2]

1844. The bishops, and the cell

Here is the part of the story that is usually told backwards.

The Catholic Church did not drive Irish temperance. About a third of the priests took the pledge, and perhaps ten of the twenty seven bishops supported Mathew. The rest were hostile or indifferent, and they acted on it.

They gave Rome lukewarm appraisals when a papal endorsement was sought. They refused to back the fund raised in his name in 1842. Archbishop John MacHale of Tuam, his fiercest critic, shut him out of the diocese. And in 1847 the bishops passed him over for Bishop of Cork, although the parish priests of that diocese had given him more votes than anyone else. [3]

Meanwhile the man himself was giving medals away to people who could not pay for them, and in 1844 he was briefly jailed for debt.

That is a year before the potato failed. The movement was already coming apart.

1845. The blight

Mathew travelled from Cork to Dublin in the last days of July 1846 and came back on the third of August. He wrote to Charles Trevelyan about what he saw.

Returning on the 3rd instant, I beheld with sorrow one wide waste of putrefying vegetation.

He turned the friary into a soup kitchen. He was ruined. The Crown granted him three hundred pounds a year from the Civil List in 1847, which tells you something about how the state regarded him and something else about how his own Church did.

The crusade was finished. A country deciding whether to eat does not hold meetings about whiskey.

1898. The Church takes it back

Fifty years after the bishops let Mathew fall, the Church picked temperance up again, and it was a different thing when it did.

The Pioneer Total Abstinence Association was founded in 1898 by a Jesuit, James Cullen. It ran as a Jesuit apostolate for about a hundred and twenty years.

Mathew had offered a social contract. Cullen offered a devotion. The Pioneer pin carried the Sacred Heart, and members wore it so that nobody would offer them a drink. Guards and soldiers were permitted to wear it on uniform, which almost nothing else was.

Membership ran to about two hundred and eighty thousand by 1914 and to roughly half a million in the 1950s. By 2020 it was a hundred thousand.

1961. The shape holds

By the middle of the twentieth century the pattern was set, and it is the pattern this series is named for.

A large, organised, visible body of people who drank nothing at all. And beside them a drinking population whose habit was episodic rather than daily, concentrated into occasions.

Both halves are unusual by European standards. A Frenchman drank wine with dinner most days and would have been astonished by either one.

2001. The one year it was earned

Then, briefly, the stereotype came true.

Irish consumption climbed through the 1990s and reached 14.3 litres of pure alcohol per adult in 2001, near the top of the developed world. Ireland was ninth highest in the OECD as late as 2018.

This is the uncomfortable half of the answer. For a century and a half the caricature was wrong and the people who drew it were repeating prejudice rather than counting anything. And then, in living memory, for about a decade, it was broadly right.

2024. Where it stands

Consumption has fallen by more than a third since that peak, to 9.49 litres per adult in 2024. Ireland now sits at about the European average, behind France, Spain and Austria.

But the shape has not changed. A quarter of adults still drink nothing. Two in five of those who do drink still drink heavily in a single sitting at least once a month, and that puts Ireland eighth in the world.

So the honest answer to the old question is neither of the two answers people want.

Ireland was never a country of heavy drinkers. It was a country of abstainers and bingers, which is a different thing and in some ways a worse one, and that was true before Father Mathew, during him, and long after the pledge card had gone out of every house that ever held one.