Paul Hurley, SVD, looks at the life and work of the great apostle of temperance, Fr Theobald Mathew.
Alcohol in Europe, an EU report last June, shows that the Irish drink almost twice as much alcohol as the EU average and that Irishmen, women and teenagers are Europe’s biggest binge drinkers. One in five adults has an alcohol problem.
This alcohol epidemic is a result of wealth; the last one, some 150 years ago, was due to poverty. It calls to mind a great Capuchin priest, Theobald Mathew, who was born in 1790 at Thomastown Castle, now a ruin, near Cashel, Co Tipperary.
With 40 rooms alone for guests, it was the home of Baron Llandaff, a Protestant of Welsh origins. Theobald’s father, James, was from a branch of the family that remained Catholic and as an orphan was reared at the Castle, where he became steward on the estate. He married Anne Whyte and bought a farm nearby, but Theobald, like most of their 12 children, spent some of his childhood at the Castle.
Educated in Kilkenny, he went to Maynooth at 17 to study for the priesthood, but left after a few months and joined the Capuchins. Ordained at 24, he was sent to their house in Cork, where he spent most of his life. He started a free school for poor children and founded a group of young men to assist him in helping the poor, about a quarter of the city’s population.
It was “the misery to which they were exposed,” he said, “which drove multitudes of the poor to seek in drink (then cheap) the antidote to their sufferings.” And it was “seeing so many crimes caused by drink” that led him to promote teetotalism. On 10 April 1838, at the first meeting of the non-sectarian Cork Total Abstinence Society, he signed a pledge to abstain from alcohol with the words, “Here goes in the name of God” and began his campaign.
He preached temperance in most parts of the country, but mainly in Munster. About 120,000 took the pledge over three days in Limerick and 80,000 during two days in Waterford. More than half the country’s adult population did so by 1846. Daniel O’Connell, who took part in a huge temperance procession, led by 40 bands, in Cork in 1842, said the movement had brought about a great moral change.
Most bishops invited Fr Mathew to preach in their dioceses. Cardinal Cullen of Dublin, an ardent supporter, got him special permission from Rome to preach anywhere in Ireland. But Archbishop MacHale of Tuam called him a “vagabond friar” and accused him of making an enormous profit from his campaign and spending it on brandy.
In fact, he lost money on his work, which was financed by various people, especially his own family, though they had investments in distilleries. But his Protestant cousin, Lady Elizabeth Mathew failed to leave him a legacy he expected. He employed three secretaries, had large postage and other expenses and spent £1,600 equipping temperance bands.
He was blamed, of course, for ruining many distilleries, breweries and pubs. As a result of his campaign, two distilleries in Galway and 60 pubs in Waterford, among numerous others, were forced to close.
In 1843 he carried his crusade to Britain, where hundreds of thousands of Irish emigrants took the pledge at more monster meetings. Despite suffering a heart attack in 1848, and against medical advice, he also campaigned in the US for two years. Though he wasn’t a great preacher, his sincerity and fervour greatly impressed people. With a fine physique, he was a shy and unassuming man, who had a bad temper.
During the Famine he turned his house in Cork into a soup kitchen for the starving and concentrated his energies on relief work. In any case the Famine soon led to the drastic decline of his crusade.
When Bishop Murphy of Cork died in 1847, most parish priests wanted Fr Mathew to succeed him, but many bishops objected. Four years later when Rome wished to make him a bishop his health prevented him accepting the honour. He died in Cobh on 8 December 1856. There are monuments to his memory on the main streets of Dublin and Cork, where it is affectionately known merely as “the statue”.
That EU report on alcohol would lead many to agree with a recent Irish newspaper headline, “Come back Fr Mathew, we need help to drink sensibly today.”
Blight of all Blights – Alcohol and the Irish
The EU report, Alcohol in Europe, published last June, found that the average Irish household spends three times more on alcohol than any other country in Europe: €1,675 a year compared to €531 by the Danes.
The alcohol industry is now worth over €6 billion annually to Ireland’s economy. Alcohol and its related problems cost Irish society €3 billion a year in health, accidents, criminal offences – 48% of all crimes and 40% of road deaths are drink-related.
Recently, the Irish Medical Journal published research findings from Cork University Hospital which show that binge-drinking is a major problem in Ireland. Some 48% of Irishmen binge drink at least once a week compared to 9% of German men. (Binge drinking is defined as taking five or more drinks in a row for men and four or more drinks in a row for women.)
Elsewhere research published in the Journal of American College Health, and conducted by psychologists in several countries, underlines that Irish women are establishing a notorious reputation as Europe’s drunks. The study shows that Irish students, for all their arrogant belief in their own cosmopolitanism, are in fact the dregs when it comes to excessive drinking.
The analysis of the drinking habits of 17,738 students, aged 17 to 30 in 21 countries found that 57% of Irish female students were classified as heavy drinkers, compared to only 3% of females from Germany, Italy, South Africa and 4% of Greek women. The most sober nation was South Africa where 29% of male students and 6% of women were drinkers compared to 95% of men and 93% for women in Ireland.
Alcohol Linked to Prosperity
Research shows that in the 10 years from 1989 to 1999, the consumption of alcohol per capita in Ireland rose by 41%, a trend which matches the increase in economic prosperity.
Speaking last September at a ceremony to honour the care and work of Cuan Mhuire, the rehabilitation centre for alcoholics, President Mary McAleese said that a regrettable by-product of a more affluent Ireland was the sharp increase in the levels of alcohol consumption in every age group in Irish society. “For individual lives it fuels so many disasters, everything from suicide to foetal abnormalities.”
And we know it plays such havoc in society – the consequences are found in our A&E departments, in the family law courts, on the dole queues, in the morgue and the safe havens like Cuan Mhuire.” This addiction, the President added, was “the blight of all blights in the modern world.”
This article first appeared in The Word (November 2006), a Divine Word Missionary Publication.
