Charles Lysaghtraises a cheer for Father Mathew
The name of Father Theobald Mathew, the Apostle of Temperance, whose death occurred at the age of 66 on this day 150 years ago, is still much invoked by those campaigning against the evils of alcohol. Rightly so.
In 1838, uttering the words "Here goes in the name of God", he founded the Cork Total Abstinence Association. Within a few years, he had achieved what was well described as a moral miracle persuading millions to take the total abstinence pledge and cutting by half alcohol consumption in Ireland.
The historical roots of the total abstinence movement are to be found among Quakers and non-conformist Protestants in America and Britain. Their Irish counterparts ran into the wall of sectarianism because their movement was suspected of being a front for proselytising.
Some Cork Quakers saw the need to have a Catholic priest in the forefront of the movement and asked Father Mathew, who had long had a leadership role among Catholics in the city, to found his association. His movement was always non-sectarian.
The success of the movement owed much to Father Mathew's personal charisma. He exuded kindliness and saintliness. Powers of healing were attributed to him. But he was more an advocate than an organiser. Having spent his own patrimony financing the campaign in the early years, he ran into debt and eventually found himself arrested by a bailiff for a Birmingham merchant who had supplied him with temperance medals. But for funds raised by Protestants in Ireland and by English admirers, notably the prime minister, Lord Russell, he could not have carried on. Eventually he felt compelled to accept a pension of £300 from the government to help him to discharge his debts.
After Father Mathew's death, the cause of total abstinence languished for many years. There was no revival in Ireland until the Jesuit Father Cullen founded the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association in 1898. Unlike Father Mathew's movement, it was totally Catholic and flowed in the mainstream of Irish Catholicism
Neither Father Mathew nor his Temperance Crusade had been in that mainstream. Having been forced, as a student, to leave Maynooth for having a party in his rooms, he had been accepted by the small Capuchin order which allowed him to retain his patrimony and elected him their Irish provincial shortly after ordination. Some Irish bishops were distrustful of him as an order priest. Father Mathew's unashamed latitudinarianism towards Protestants also set him apart in a church that was moving to organise the life of the faithful along strictly sectarian lines.
When, in 1847, the priests of the diocese of Cork voted for him to be their bishop, the hierarchy was almost unanimous in advising the pope not to appoint him.
He was deeply hurt and saw it as a rejection of the temperance cause. It was, in fact, symptomatic of a broader feeling that he was what might now be called "a loose cannon".
Significantly, in 1890, when an appeal was launched to put up the statue now standing in Dublin's O'Connell Street, the Catholic clergy were criticised by Parnellite and Protestant subscribers for their poor support. The largest subscriber was Mr Cook of the travel firm who had observed Father Mathew's work in England half a century earlier.
The statue itself is rather a nonsense as it depicts Father Mathew in Capuchin robes that he had never worn in his lifetime.
The Pioneers, who celebrate him as a founding father, continue to campaign against the evils of alcohol.
We could still honour Father Mathew's memory and do our own generation a service if we curtailed advertising that, of its nature, stimulates artificially the desire for alcohol, especially among the impressionable.
• Charles Lysaghtis a freelance writer