Before the Pledge

Start with a warning, because this article is shorter than the others and the reason matters.

We know what Ireland drank in 1839 because the Crown taxed it and wrote the number down. We know far less about what Ireland drank before that, because a great deal of it was never taxed and never written down at all.

Anyone who gives you a confident figure for Irish drinking in 1800 is estimating. Usually from the duty returns, which by definition miss the part that mattered most.

1839. The one number we can trust

In 1839 Ireland cleared 12,296,000 gallons of spirits for consumption and paid £1,434,573 in duty.

A population of roughly eight million. Legal spirits alone, before anything brewed at home or run off a hillside still.

That is the eve of the pledge, and it is the only solid ground in this article.

1779. The still on the hill

The problem with the official figures is poitín.

Irish distilling had been legal, domestic and widespread. A series of eighteenth century revenue acts made a licensed still expensive and a small one illegal, and the trade did not stop. It moved.

It moved to exactly the places this site writes about most. The mountain, the bog, the island, the townland the excise officer reached last. A still needed barley, water, turf and distance, and the west of Ireland had all four.

So a duty return measures the honest half of Irish drinking and shrugs at the rest. The unlicensed half was concentrated where the poverty was, and that is the half no ledger holds. [1]

The shebeen and the dram shop

Two words carry most of the pre-pledge drinking world, and they are not the same thing.

A shebeen was an unlicensed house selling drink, usually poitín, usually in a kitchen. No sign, no licence, no record.

A dram shop was legal. It sold spirits by the measure to be drunk on the spot, and it multiplied in the towns.

Between them they meant that in most of Ireland a man was never far from a drink, and in much of it he was never far from a drink that no one was counting.

Honesty demands a caution here. The number of licensed premises in Ireland before 1838, and any credible estimate of the scale of illicit distilling, were not established for this series. [2] Both are knowable from parliamentary papers. Neither is quoted here, because a figure that cannot be shown to a reader is not worth printing.

Why the tavern held the parish

There is a structural point underneath all of this, and it explains more than any consumption figure.

In pre-Famine Ireland there was almost nowhere else to go.

No public library, no parish hall, no reading room, no club, no sports ground, no cinema, no wireless. For a labouring man the choice of indoor space outside his own cabin was the chapel or the public house, and only one of them was open on a Tuesday evening.

This is the thing the temperance movement understood and its opponents did not. Telling a man to stop going to the public house was telling him to stop going anywhere.

Which is why the movement, when it came, did not only issue pledges. It built halls.

1829. Before Mathew there was Ulster

One correction to the popular account before we go on.

Father Mathew did not begin Irish temperance. Organised temperance in Ireland began in Ulster, and it began Protestant.

The Reverend John Edgar, a Presbyterian minister, launched a temperance initiative in 1829, nine years before the meeting in Cork. The early Irish societies were largely northern, largely Protestant and largely moderationist, which meant they asked members to give up spirits and let them keep beer and wine.

Mathew's movement differed on both counts. It was southern and Catholic in its following, and it demanded total abstinence.

That second difference is the one that made it enormous. A pledge to be moderate is a matter of judgement and no two men keep it the same way. A pledge to take nothing at all is a line, and a line can be sworn to in public, in front of witnesses, with a medal to prove it.

1838. What he was walking into

So this is the country Theobald Mathew addressed in April 1838.

Eight million people. Twelve million gallons of legal spirits and an unknown quantity of illegal. A licensed trade in the towns and an unlicensed one in the hills. No social infrastructure of any kind outside the public house. And an existing temperance movement that was northern, Protestant, moderate, and going nowhere in the three southern provinces.

He changed all of it inside four years, and then it fell apart, and the reasons it fell apart are more interesting than the reasons it worked.