Drink and Culture in Nineteenth-century Ireland

The Alcohol Trade and the Politics of the Irish Public House

Bradley Kadel

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780857737069
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

The vibrant Irish public house of the nineteenth century hosted broad networks of social power, enabling publicans and patrons to disseminate tremendous influence across Ireland and beyond. During the period, affluent publicans coalesced into one of the most powerful and sophisticated forces in Irish parliamentary politics. Among the leading figures of public life, they commanded an unmatched economic route to middle-class prosperity, inserted themselves into the centre of crucial legislative debates, and took part in fomenting the issues of class, gender, and national identity which continue to be contested today. From the other side of the bar, regular patrons relied on this social institution to construct, manage and spread their various social and political causes. From Daniel O'Connell to the Guinness dynasty, from the Acts of Union to the Great Famine, and from Christmas boxes to Fenianism; Bradley Kadel offers a first and much-needed scholarly examination of the 'incendiary politics of the pub' in nineteenth-century Ireland.

Introduction

I

Publicans and public houses so profoundly transfigured the rich landscape of the social, political and economic history of the long nineteenth century in Ireland, that an investigation of the world surrounding the Irish drink trade marks a crucial – if not indispensable – step in comprehending the history of the making of modern Ireland. On either side of the bar, from the masses of drinkers who socialized and passed so much of their lives in and around the pub, to the publicans and their assistants who managed these businesses, the public house built and disseminated networks of social power and political influence across Ireland and beyond. On one level, affluent publicans built one of the most politically powerful and savvy forces in Irish parliamentary politics, and inserted themselves into the center of some of the most crucial legislative debates of the nineteenth century. On another level, the habitués of the pub relied on this social institution to construct, manage, and spread their various social and political causes. From the onset of modern parliamentary politics in the 1830s to the end of World War I, the publicans of Ireland, as a group, played one of the leading roles in public life and provided an economic route to middle-class prosperity for many Irish Catholics.

In the years following the Act of Union, Dublin publicans began working together in new ways for the mutual protection of their livelihoods. Regrouping in 1819 to face newly emerging political demands, vintners from the Corporation of Cooks and Vintners, in an attempt to create a more politically oriented trade association, withdrew from the guild society and founded the Licensed Vintners’ Association (LVA).¹ In the decade following its founding, the new organization, like its predecessor, focused much of its attention and resources on philanthropic endeavors, though a new, more overtly political role quickly emerged after the passage of the Reform Act of 1832. In an earnest campaign that foreshadowed its later role as the political defender of the Irish drink trade, the LVA plunged in 1833 into the political world of Westminster during the protracted negotiations over the Irish Licensing Act.² The considerable concessions procured by the Irish trade in this sweeping legislation, which began the nineteenth-century effort to modernize the liquor-licensing laws in Ireland, marked the emergence of Dublin vintners in the still-nascent world of nineteenth-century Irish popular politics. The adept political role performed by the LVA during the drafting of these laws demonstrated the association’s new function. The association would serve primarily as an apparatus for protecting the trade from restrictive government measures and preserving – if not expanding – the rights of the publican under the terms of the standard liquor license.³ In its role as a source for providing social security for vulnerable vintners and members of their families – mostly the aged, widows, and orphans of Irish publicans – the organized trade continued to concentrate much of its efforts on social relief until the transformative decade of the 1860s.⁴ By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the concern for humanitarian relief had been almost completely eclipsed by the more political role of the association at home in local politics and legal affairs, and at Westminster with the overseeing of parliamentary matters.

Foremost among the new perils to the drink trade were those emanating from the Irish magistracy and constabulary in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Under orders from Dublin Castle, officials began in the late 1830s to execute a series of new orders that, it was hoped, would purge dangerous conspirators from the working-class taprooms across Ireland. In an effort to bring social discipline to the public house, the Scottish-born undersecretary for Ireland, Captain Thomas Drummond, inaugurated a fresh offensive against Ribbon societies, oath-bound secret underground organizations pledged to the overthrow of British rule. Drummond’s innovative approach to fighting Ribbonism in Ireland centered largely on levying harsh legal penalties against publicans who knowingly hosted meetings of secret societies on their premises, and intensifying the policing of the barroom itself. Reacting to these new legal threats, the LVA began to pressure members of their trade association to distance themselves from any linkage with groups with ties to revolutionary activities. Moreover, the bourgeois leadership of the LVA found in the controversies swirling around the public house and Ribbonism an opportunity to purge their ranks of traders who were perceived most wanting in that powerful Victorian quality of respectability. The facile identification of the public house with vice, excess, crime, and treason in the new era of temperance and improvement, most imperiled those license holders in Ireland located on the lower rungs of the social ladder.

Located at the nexus of lower-class life, the public house was perhaps the most natural – if not nearly irresistible – retreat for revolutionary secret societies during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Indeed, publicans and their assistants were disproportionately represented within the leadership of physical-force nationalist groups, at least until the zenith of the Fenian movement in 1867. As the threat of civil unrest began to fade later in the century, the importance of the public house as a locus of underground revolutionary activities began also to decrease. The reasons for this move away from the pub were many, but the most important factors included reforms to the licensing laws, the merging of temperance and nationalist politics, more intense monitoring of the barroom by police, and the growing clout and respectability of the licensed trade. In fact, by the turn of the century physical-force, revolutionary organizations in Ireland would almost completely retreat from using the barroom for meetings and recruitment, the leadership opting instead for more secure – and less public – meeting places.

The 1830s marked a historical watershed for the Irish licensed trade, making it a natural point at which to begin mapping the landscape of the politics of drink in Ireland. During this formative period, vintner trade associations and the temperance movement began a long struggle with one another to define and dominate the issues surrounding what would become known as “The Drink Question.” Involving all matters surrounding the sale and consumption of intoxicants, this question permeated Irish politics and divided the country along uneven economic, social, and gender lines. In 1833 the debates on these issues got under way when the British Parliament took the first of a series of steps to reshape the licensing laws that governed the public-house system. Guided, on one hand, by liberal principles and, on the other, by a sense of urgency to preserve social order, MPs considered measures that would extend to Ireland the lifting of restrictions on the beer trade, increased penalties for publicans suspected of hosting meetings of secret revolutionary societies, and more rigorous application procedures for those seeking a retail license. In Ireland the reforms would give constables greater access for policing public houses, and magistrates the liberty to suspend trading in those houses where it was suspected that outrages were most likely to be planned. For the vast majority of those lower-class men who partook publicly of alcohol, a law passed in 1836 would have a profound impact: the legislation empowered constables to arrest any individual for being drunk, without any pretext whatsoever. Thus, the new era of liquor licensing reforms would subject not just publicans and assistants behind the counters to unprecedented regulatory oversight and penalties, but would mandate, by threat of fines and incarceration, the respectable comportment of drinkers themselves.

A resurgent physical-force brand of Irish nationalism, and the growing potency of the temperance legislative agenda at Westminster, prompted the Irish retail drink trade in the 1860s to consolidate its splintered trade under a single organization.⁵ In the opening year of that decade vintners and licensed grocers in Dublin – by far the largest group of businesses licensed for the sale of spirits – resolved their differences, combining to form one consolidated trade association, the Licensed Grocers and Vintners’ Protection Association (LGVPA). That licensed grocers – those retailers who carried on a trade in both intoxicants and groceries – identified with the licensed trade rather than with shopkeepers and drapers provides evidence of a maturing political consciousness among the holders of retail licenses. In contrast to the situation in England, licensed grocers were common – if not the norm – in Ireland until the latter half of the twentieth century. Though the British government had sought to separate spirit and beer licenses from the sale of food and other goods in Ireland in the 1830s, the licensed-grocery trade would remain the most common form of liquor retailing throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Equally important to the political realignment defined by the formation of the LGVPA in 1860, however, was the increasingly isolated position of the beerhouse keepers and spirit grocers. By excluding these license holders, who were bound by unique legal rights and restrictions in Ireland, the LGVPA gained the political upper hand within the trade.⁶ Finally, this step towards greater trade consolidation aimed to place pressure on the illegal shebeen trade that was so widespread in Ireland. Shebeens were legally unrecognized places, and so-called shebeening tended to damage the reputation of publicans and licensed grocers.

In this concerted effort to discipline the popular culture surrounding drink, Dublin vintners, along with their sister trade associations around the country, largely cooperated with constables and officers from the Inland Revenue to streamline and more tightly regulate the liquor trade. By constraining as much as possible the competition posed by illegal distillation, low public houses, beerhouses, and –most important – secret shebeens, the newly united LGVPA hoped to capture market share from these threatening haunts of the lower classes and thereby recast the image of Irish publicans as protectors of the public good. The perception of the clandestine shebeen trade in intoxicants operating freely across the city helped to galvanize retail traders, who were otherwise suspicious of one another.⁷ In fact, statistics appear to back up vintner concerns over shebeens: In a reversal from earlier decades, parliamentary reports reveal that arrests for “shebeening” in Dublin and its environs were strikingly higher than in most of the rest of Ireland.⁸ Such damning statistics relating to alcohol consumption in Dublin helped to spur the LGVPA to embark on a project of ending the illegal shebeen trade that played such an important part in defining the neighborhoods and countryside of so many localities in Dublin and beyond.

As temperance reformers shifted their attention from pledge drives to legislative restriction of the liquor trade in the 1860s, the LGVPA countered with an unprecedented political campaign of its own, centering its efforts on bringing all respectable publicans across Ireland into their trade association and securing parliamentary allies at Westminster. The legislative threat of the temperance movement alarmed vintners, since the announcement of the campaign broke with earlier forms of temperance reform in Ireland.⁹ Whereas the campaign of Father Theobald Mathew, dubbed the “apostle of temperance” during his phenomenally successful tenure as leader of theCork Total Abstinence Association, had centered on instigating a moral revolution based upon individual vows of abstinence, the new danger to the vintner trade stemmed from a well-organized and largely international temperance lobby with substantial legislative leverage.¹⁰ In its leadership, too, the movement showed signs of change. The temperance standard-bearers of the new era would be parliamentarians, not simply priests and pastors, and collective political action would be emphasized, rather than the mere reform of individuals through pledge-taking temperance campaigns and moral suasion. In the years immediately after the Great Famine, the temperance movement had attempted, with little success, to sustain the momentum of Father Mathew’s campaign, expanding its vision of temperance to fit better with the new age of progress and improvement.¹¹ In a lecture delivered to the Dublin Statistical Society, James Haughton articulated this broader vision of temperance as a social and public project some two decades before its metamorphosis into a full-fledged legislative campaign:

The great law of progress demands at your hands the sustainment of the temperance reformation. That love of our fellow man, which is the only sure bond of the social edifice, calls upon you to give your hearts to this good work, so that the economic, the social, and the moral laws may be no longer impeded in their operation by the counteracting influences of alcoholic drinks.¹²

Though Haughton’s views, along with those of his temperance colleagues, appealed to a widely perceived public necessity for temperance, his appeal remained, like that of Father Mathew, firmly linked to an individual sense of Christian conversion and spiritual revival. Reformer though he was, Haughton did not advocate the organized, multifaceted legislative campaign against drink that his Irish successors in the 1860s would implement.

During the years that intervened between the campaign of Father Mathew and the emergence of a legislative temperance campaign in the 1860s, the temperance movement in Ireland had searched with little success for a way to revive the energy and effectiveness of the cause. This decline of temperance in Ireland had several grounds. First, much of the organizational apparatus and popular enthusiasm that Father Mathew had inspired had by the late 1840s been siphoned off by the demographic disaster of the Great Famine and by the Repeal movement of Daniel O’Connell.¹³ Second, in the 1850s temperance legislation had been overshadowed by more pressing concerns over tenant rights and educational reform.¹⁴ Although the post-famine years had featured a trend toward legislative coercion of the drink trade internationally (including the adoption of prohibition in Maine in the United States and the closing of public houses on Sundays in Scotland), temperance societies outside of Protestant communities experienced little organizational leadership in Ireland until the founding of new temperance bodies in the 1860s. During that decade groups such as the Irish Total Abstinence Society, the Permissive Bill Association, and the Sunday Closing Association, all of which possessed a circle of prominent Irish founding members, profoundly transformed the political face of temperance in Ireland.

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• eCopyright