The Famine Breaks It

The usual sentence is that the Famine destroyed the temperance movement.

It is not wrong, exactly. It is late.

The movement was failing before the blight arrived, and the Famine finished something that was already going. That order matters, because the two explanations point at completely different causes.

1843. The peak, and the turn

1843 is the high water mark. The pledge claims are at their largest, the excise returns are at their lowest, and the teetotallers are stewarding the monster meetings.

After that the line turns down, and everything that turns it down is internal.

The scheme had no money. Mathew was giving medals to people who could not buy them and subsidising the difference himself.

The bishops had refused to back the fund raised in his name in 1842, at exactly the moment it might have saved the thing.

And a total pledge, sworn in public, has a natural attrition. Every year some proportion of those who took it broke it, and breaking it was humiliating, and a man who had broken it did not come back.

1844. A debtors cell

In 1844 Theobald Mathew was briefly imprisoned for debt.

The potato failed in 1845.

Set those two dates beside each other and the standard account collapses. The leader of the largest voluntary movement in Irish history was in a cell for insolvency a full year before the blight was seen in a single field.

The general literature is clear that a serious decline had begun before the Famine. [1]

What the Famine did was make recovery impossible.

1846. One wide waste

In the last days of July 1846 Mathew travelled from Cork to Dublin. The crop looked sound. He came back on the third of August and wrote to Charles Trevelyan at the Treasury.

Returning on the 3rd instant, I beheld with sorrow one wide waste of putrefying vegetation. [2]

Seven days. That is how long it took, and it is why nobody was prepared.

The letter survives because Trevelyan printed it himself, in his own account of the crisis, which is a piece of irony the reader can do what they like with.

1847. The friary becomes a soup kitchen

Mathew turned the Cork friary over to feeding people, and went further into debt doing it.

In 1847 Lord John Russell's government granted him three hundred pounds a year from the Civil List. [3]

In the same year the Catholic bishops of Ireland passed him over for the vacant see of Cork, although the parish priests of the diocese had voted him first.

The British Treasury pensioned him. His own Church would not promote him. Both of those happened in 1847 and neither was a coincidence.

Why a starving country stops signing pledges

It is worth saying plainly why the movement could not survive, because the reasons are not the obvious one.

The obvious one is that people died and emigrated, and they did, in numbers that gutted every organisation in rural Ireland.

But the deeper reason is what the movement was for.

Temperance was a programme of self improvement. It asked a man to give up something today in order to be a better provider, a better husband and a more respectable citizen tomorrow. It was an argument about the future.

In 1847 there was no argument about the future. There was this week.

And its second function, the halls and the bands and the reading rooms, collapsed too. Those needed subscriptions, a committee, a man with time on a Tuesday evening. The parishes where the movement was strongest in the south and the west were the parishes that emptied.

A movement built on respectability and the long view cannot operate in a society that has lost both.

1849. What survived

Mathew sailed for America in the summer of 1849, partly to revive the cause and partly because he owed money. He came back in December 1851 and was never the same. A series of strokes followed. He died in 1856.

Three things survived him.

The idea that total abstinence was a respectable Irish Catholic position, which is not obvious and was not true anywhere else in Catholic Europe.

The habit of organising it, with a pledge, a token and a hall, which the Pioneers picked up wholesale in 1898.

And a shape in the national drinking pattern. A large body of people who drank nothing at all, sitting alongside everybody else. That shape is still there, and it is what this series is named for.

What did not survive was the number. Spirit consumption climbed back. Whatever those three years had proved about what a country can do, it did not stay done.