‘Unnecessarily offensive to all Irish’

In the House of Commons, members were considering amendments to a bill, which South Louth’s Irish nationalist MP Joseph Nolan condemned as “inappropriate, ill-considered, malicious in its provisions, and unnecessarily offensive to all Irish who have some respect for the beautiful fame of their country ”.

The MP found the same title – the Drunkenness Bill (Ireland) – objectionable.

Nolan’s comments were published in The Irish Times the next day, July 8, 1905. The provisions of the bill, which would become law in November 1908 under a different name, had wide support in the House of Representatives. the Commons. Among other things, its objective was to financially protect the spouses from “habitual drunkards”, both husbands and wives, and to establish sanctions for those who were in charge of a drunken child. It also made it a crime to buy a drink from a drunk person in or around a licensed establishment: the culprits were subject to “a fine not exceeding forty shillings, or imprisonment, with or without forced labor, for a period not exceeding one month.”

Nolan objected to the idea that Ireland was a special case, with a population drunk enough to require its own measures, “as if drunkenness was more prevalent there than in England, Scotland, or Wales.”

Maybe he was right. But generally speaking, “intemperance” among the Irish population had been a topic of debate that appeared frequently in the pages of The Irish Times to the point of Nolan’s defense of Ireland’s “just fame”. The debate focused less on its existence, without a doubt there was a problem, but rather on the solution.

A search for “drunkenness” and “Ireland” in The Irish Times archive yields some interesting results. The temperance movement was gaining widespread support around the world during the 19th century, and Ireland was no different. Any number of organizations came up in the name of abstinence from alcohol; many, many meetings on the subject followed. Drinking was related to almost every imaginable “evil”.

Sweden comes up a lot. On August 17, 1860, The Irish Times ran a story about a meeting of the Blackrock chapter of the Hibernian Bible Society, which heard how the gospels had made their way through Sweden, where the drink had previously taken hold. “In Sweden … which had been notable as one of the countries where drunkenness was a plague, there had been a wonderful revival and the Scriptures spread across the land with the most encouraging result.”

‘A melancholic fact’

Directly below the story, fittingly, was a report on the Total Abstinence Society meeting at Dublin’s Metropolitan Hall, led by Benjamin Benson, an agent for the Irish Temperance League in America. Benson, who would later become the owner of a temperance hotel and restaurant in Dublin, was a black man, and in his leadership, he inextricably linked hard liquor and slavery. This occurred less than three years before the Emancipation Proclamation.

The Irish Times reported: “Mr. Benson was first introduced to the meeting and, having alluded to his African ancestry, said that there was prejudice against Africans as they had lost their national character. It was also a melancholy fact that slavery and intemperance went hand in hand. Alcoholic drink is the father of slavery, and it was from the time of Noah and the patriarchs to the present day. “

The same association, in the same place four years later, held a similar type of meeting. A petition was read saying that “the common sale of intoxicating liquors is the main cause of drunkenness, immorality, insanity, crime and poverty of the nation.”

Lunacy is interesting. The 19th century census reports list the number of “lunatics” by county, along with causes, which are divided into “moral and mental” and “physical.” The first group contains things like: pain, terror, religious enthusiasm and the reverse of fortune. The latter had “causes” such as: head trauma, epilepsy, diseases of the nervous system and intemperance. In 1881, for example, census reports listed “intemperance” as the second most common “physical” cause of insanity.

Those “lunatics” who were deemed to have induced their own condition through drinking did not win unanimous sympathy. At the annual meeting for supporters of the “Stewart Institute for Morons” in January 1875, a doctor named Banks said that residents had “more objections to his pity than the lunatic who caused the madness by drunkenness, because intemperance was a of the most fertile causes of mental illness “.

Moral and social problems were, of course, a common topic of conversation. In an 1874 Christmas Eve editorial, The Irish Times chimed in: “There are also some who think Christmas is a time for debauchery and drunkenness, and for stealing their children’s food,” the article read, perhaps in an attempt to awaken the consciousness of aspiring drinkers. “May the voices of the bells of our old temples, sweeping the houses and rolling happily but tenderly on the pavement, stop you on your way and tell you that Christmas is the only holiday of the year that should sanctify the wife, the son and home. “

Sunday closing

Crime was probably the biggest selling point. Drunkenness itself was an offense punishable by light penalties, but it was considered to be the basis of many other more serious crimes. Consequently, as the century progressed, the 1870s saw a new push to close pubs on Sundays. In the late 1870s, Sunday was frequently identified in Irish Times reports as the driest day of the week.

A letter written by then-Catholic Cardinal Paul Cullen in March 1870 illustrates the attitude of those who support Sunday’s closure:

“Almost all the crimes that we have to deplore in Ireland can be attributed to drunkenness; and as long as the doors of the tavern remain open during the free time on Sunday, it will be really very difficult to wrest this degrading vice from among our people ”. Cullen called for legislation to impose the Sunday ban, for the “spiritual and temporal well-being of our fine people.”

Religious figures were against liquor, in general. Several bishops, in the absence of legislation, told people to refrain from drinking on Sundays, with (they said) apparent localized success. The Irish Times wrote of the Bishop of Cashel, after his death in January 1875, that he had “made war” against drunkenness, but he was far from alone. In Bessbrook, Co Armagh, a policy of no drinking on Sundays had meant that there was no need for police, at least, according to one member of the Irish Sunday Closing Association, who spoke in October 1875.

A bill was passed to close pubs on Sundays in all cities except Dublin, Limerick, Waterford, Belfast, and Cork, although innkeepers could sell liquor to “real” travelers over long distances, more than three miles. It entered into force on October 1, 1878, initially for a four-year trial period, and was met with relative compliance. Confusion remained around some questions: How could a bartender know how far a self-proclaimed traveler had come? The Irish Times even published a “ask the expert” question and answer session with Isaac Butt on October 5.

Whether it really worked or not is another matter. Initial results after six months indicated a sharp drop in drunken arrests. Issues of later years, however, contained stories that claimed the exact opposite, and said that drunkenness had escalated in the counties and towns to which the law applied. As expected, the winegrowers association was of the latter opinion.

However, the numbers often supported Sunday shutdown supporters. By December 1881, 9,403 arrests had been reported less on Sundays and 22,855 in total. Between the implementation of the law and the end of 1880, there had been a reduction in the consumption of wine and spirits to the tune of nearly £ 3 million, according to supporters of the law.

The Sunday Closing Association’s focus was on expanding the mandate to all five cities, but that was strongly opposed. The law, when it expired after trial, was renewed annually under the Continuity of Expired Laws Act. This lasted for 24 years, when the Law became permanent in 1906 and the hours of sale in the big cities were reduced from five (2:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.) to three.

The argument in favor of Sunday closings was that if temptation made the thief, then the provision of hard liquor made the drunkard. But The Irish Times, which criticized some of the political tactics used to oppose the legislation, actually disagreed with the idea from the start. “If all the bars were closed on Sundays, there would still be drunken men and women,” reads an editorial on February 3, 1877, an article that echoes some arguments already being made against the possible restriction of bars. hours off license in 2020.

Supporters of the movement, the newspaper said, “would find that it is the Saturday night supply that intoxicates Sunday, and the galvanized drinker on Holy Monday, and Tuesday, half fool, half mad.” A half-pint jug, some of them “very carefully molded to fit in the breast pocket of the vest,” cost a penny at the time. You could fill that with spirits on a Saturday, act or not act.