The Pioneers

A small enamel pin with the Sacred Heart on it. Worn on the lapel, on the left, where everyone could see it.

Anybody Irish over about fifty knows exactly what it meant and can tell you who in their family wore one.

The Pioneer Total Abstinence Association is the longest running mass movement in modern Irish life, and it is the second half of the temperance story. It is also the opposite of the first half in almost every respect.

1898. A Jesuit, not a friar

It was founded in 1898 by James Cullen, a Jesuit, and it ran as a Jesuit apostolate for about a hundred and twenty years until lay leadership took over between 2015 and 2018.

That sentence contains the whole difference.

Mathew was a Capuchin with no institutional backing, prompted by a Quaker, opposed by most of his bishops. Cullen was a Jesuit, and the Jesuits are an institution with a structure, a training, an income and a memory.

Mathew asked millions to sign in a field on an afternoon. Cullen made new members serve a two year probation before full membership.

Mathew's crusade lasted six years. Cullen's association is still going after a hundred and twenty seven.

The pin, and what it was for

The Pioneer pin was not a medal in Mathew's sense. His medals were proof of a promise and, in the hands of the country people, something close to a charm.

The pin did a practical job. It told the room not to offer you a drink.

That sounds small. It is not, in a culture where refusing a drink is an act that needs explaining and where a man who says no is asked why. The pin answered the question in advance, silently, and removed the argument before it started.

It carried the Sacred Heart, and membership involved a daily prayer, the Heroic Offering. So the act had moved. Under Mathew, abstinence was a social contract and a step toward respectability. Under the Pioneers it was a devotion, offered up.

Gardaí and soldiers were permitted to wear the pin on uniform. Almost nothing else was, and that single permission tells you how completely the association had been absorbed into the official life of the state.

1959. Half a million

The numbers are remarkable and they have a clean shape.

About two hundred and eighty thousand members by 1914. Three hundred and sixty thousand by 1948. Roughly half a million in the 1950s.

Half a million people, in a country of under three million in the Republic, publicly committed to never taking a drink. [1]

This is the same decade covered in the other series on this site, the one about the men who never married, and it is the same society. A country at its lowest population, at its most emigrant, at its most clerical, and at its most organised.

The Pioneers were not a fringe. In the Ireland of 1955 they were closer to the establishment than the drinkers were.

1999. The fall

Two hundred thousand members in Ireland by 1999, with another three hundred thousand elsewhere. A hundred thousand across Ireland by 2020. [2]

The decline runs alongside the collapse in religious practice and the fall in vocations, and it has the same causes. An association that recruited through schools, sodalities and confirmation classes loses its supply when those stop delivering.

But there is a second cause, and it is the more interesting one.

The pin solved a problem that stopped existing. Its whole function was to make refusing a drink socially possible in a society where it was socially difficult.

In the Ireland of 2020 a person can say no thanks and be handed a sparkling water without anybody raising an eyebrow. The non drinker is now ordinary, and a quarter of adults are one.

The Pioneers did not lose that argument. They won it, and then the badge was no longer needed.

What it did and did not do

Here is the uncomfortable comparison, and it is worth making because the two movements are usually treated as one continuous thing.

Father Mathew halved the national consumption of spirits in three years. It is in the excise returns and it is not arguable.

The Pioneers, across a hundred and twenty years and at a peak of half a million members, never moved a national consumption figure at all. Irish drinking went up through their strongest decades and kept going up, reaching its all time peak in 2001 while the association still had hundreds of thousands on its books.

That is not a failure, because it was never the aim. Mathew wanted to change a country. Cullen wanted to sanctify individuals, and he succeeded in enormous numbers, one lapel at a time.

But it does answer a question people ask about Irish drinking. The Pioneers were not a brake on national consumption. They were a separate population living inside it.

Which is the half sober nation, exactly as it says on the front of this series.