Nothing illustrates the epic quality of Ireland's struggle with drink quite like the name of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association, writes Frank McNally.
In the US, "the Pioneers" were those intrepid people who over three centuries braved hardship and danger in the American wilderness: battling rugged terrain, rapids, droughts, blizzards, wild animals, and fierce indigenous tribes until their victory was declared total with the formal closing of the frontier in 1896.
When he set up the PTAA two years later, Father James Cullen must have thought that similar courage would be needed in taming the wilderness of Irish drinking habits.
Whether he foresaw a particular challenge in the wild west, as the Pioneer movement crossed the Mississippi at Athlone and headed into the Indian country of shebeens and home distilleries, I don't know. But even today the west is still romanticised as the last bastion of resistance to the licensing laws.
The Irish Pioneers were not, in fact, the first to brave the frontier. Sixty years earlier, Father Theobald Mathew had blazed a trail of sobriety across Ireland, launching his campaign in Cork in 1838 with the words "Here goes in the name of God". At his movement's height - in the ominous year of 1845 - it is thought that more than 3 million were avoiding alcohol; except, as "the pledge" put it, when prescribed "by a medical man".
Father Mathew later took his campaign to England - and, indeed, to the US, where the idea that only total abstinence could cure the evils of alcohol was also catching on. His influence in America was sufficient for a statue in his honour to be erected in Salem, Massachusetts.
Dublin has a statue of him too, of course, and the bishops gathered under it recently to mount their latest anti-drink campaign. With affluence now as big a threat to sobriety as cheap whiskey was in the 1840s, the Irish pioneer movement faces yet another new challenge on the frontier. Consequently, there seems to have been a change of emphasis.
While still stressing the virtues of abstinence, the bishops are now preaching the cause of moderation. Father Mathew thought this was too difficult a concept for the Irish to deal with and that it was better to keep things simple. So as he looked down from his pedestal on O'Connell Street, it can only be hoped that he approved of the tactical shift.
Not that it's really him up there, in any sense. I'm indebted to reader Diarmuid Breathnach for pointing out that the statue is a monument to Ireland's struggle with drink, in more ways than one. It was commissioned to mark the 1890 centenary of Father Mathew's birth. And needing a well-built man to pose for it, the sculptor - Tipperary woman Mary Redmond - chose her model from a shelter for the homeless. She had him fitted with a Capuchin habit and started work.
Unfortunately, the man was a drinker. One day, at an advanced stage of modelling, he got plastered in the more traditional manner and was dismissed. In revenge, he later broke into the studio and badly vandalised his likeness.
So, as well as representing the "Apostle of Temperance", the statue in O'Connell Street also represents - in a concrete way - the very thing he was trying to stamp out.
The clergy themselves could be fond of a drop, as Father Mathew well knew. Diarmuid Breathnach also mentions an amusing story about the 19th-century Archbishop of Dublin, Paul Cullen, and a Father Healy from Bray. The latter was asked by a concerned parishioner if the rumour was true - that Archbishop Cullen had been heard to use the word "damn" in conversation.
Father Healy responded gamely that he had "known Paul Cullen this 40 years and, drunk or sober, he would never use that word". His defence of one part of the Archbishop's reputation at the expense of another is said to have delayed the Bray priest's promotion to a parish.
But a complaint lodged by Father Mathew with Cullen some time earlier (when Cullen was based in Rome) suggests the Apostle of Temperance was up against worse challenges in the Irish clergy. Predictably, one of the biggest problems was in the wild west. The subject of his complaint to the Vatican was Archbishop McHale of Tuam, described by Father Mathew as the temperance society's "implacable enemy".
McHale had "in private and in public applied the most degrading epithets to me and the teetotallers," complained Father Mathew in his letter, and "has encouraged many of his priests to return to the use of intoxicating drinks". But there was worse. A few Sundays earlier, the archbishop had made "a most atrocious charge against me in the chapel of his mensal parish, Kilmeena, in the face of a large and astonished congregation". Father Mathew went on to describe the charge in grisly detail.
"After a long tirade in Irish against the society, he said that I was a vagabond friar, that I went about with a woman [ his italics], that she sold medals for me, charging a shilling for bits of Birmingham pewter which cost only two pence, and that we spent the money drinking brandy and water and laughing at the poor dupes whom we had robbed."
It appears to have been a close thing whether the archbishop's audience or his target was the more shocked by this. The letter continued: "A shrill of horror ran through the congregation at the awful insinuation that Father Mathew was living in sacrilegious guilt with this woman and that he was a brandy drinker."