Pioneering spirits

Public hand-wringing over St Patrick's Day boozing is nothing new, as Diarmaid Ferriter found when he went looking through the archives of the Licensed Vintners Association

Complaints about St Patrick's Day becoming an occasion of national binge drinking and violence have abounded in recent years.

This year, the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Michael Conaghan, invited representatives of the off-license trade to the Mansion House for a chat (over a cup of tea, presumably) about the possibility of keeping off–licenses shut until 6pm on St Patrick's Day. They were having none of it.

National Off-License Association chairman Jim McCabe said he resented the blame for public drunkenness being laid at their door. He argued it was up to individuals to regulate their own behaviour.

"The law says we can't sell to people who are drunk, under 18 or allow drinking outside our premises", he said.

"Rest assured that 99 per cent of all off-licenses don't want to break that law."

The drink sellers have always been a powerful lobby group in Irish society and are well used to being blamed for drink-induced mayhem. They have been professionally organised since the nineteenth century, politically adept and conscious of the need to portray themselves as promoters of sensible drinking.

A trawl through the archives of the Licensed Vintners Association (LVA), off Anglesea Road in Dublin 4, reveals how over the last 100 years they have repeatedly rejected the arguments of their critics, and have done so with considerable gusto.

But present day Vintners should count themselves lucky, as there was a time when their forefathers were persuaded to close their pubs on St Patrick's Day.

The propaganda of those to the forefront of the Irish cultural revival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century placed a premium on sobriety, and the idea of the sober patriot – be they politician, soldier or athlete – was widely expounded.

Of course, it was widely ignored as well, but it had enough currency to ensure the "voluntary" closing of pubs on St Patrick's Day from 1904 on, in order not to besmirch the name and memory of the patron saint. There was no "Paddy's Day" then (how irreverent we've become!), but "St Patrick's Day", a celebration that was deemed more religious than social, and certainly not an occasion for the youth of Ireland to puke and piss all over their native towns and frighten the life out of anyone who stood in their way.

The Gaelic League and the GAA had been to the forefront of the campaign to ensure pubs were closed on St Patrick's Day, and at the invitation of the Archbishop of Dublin, the LVA agreed to the request. An offer from the Chief Secretary, George Wyndham, to pass a law to this effect was declined; it was thought preferable for the pubs' closure to be a voluntary sacrifice.

There was criticism of the decision subsequently. In 1921, Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Féin, condemned the closures as an affront to working-class people. During the 1920s, however, there was widespread concern about public drunkenness, and in 1927 the Dáil legislated for St Patrick's Day pub closures. (The afternoon closing hour was introduced in the same year.)

But the LVA's acquiescence proved to be temporary. The idea of changing the law was mooted in the early 1930s and the LVA began rallying against it, deploring the fact that the national festival was "celebrated in sack-cloth and ashes". The LVA produced figures indicating that convictions for abuse of the licensing laws in Ireland were the lowest in the world per head of population. Arrests for drunkenness had fallen from over 9,000 at the start of the century to 910 by 1931, the LVA claimed.

Yet in no other country was there such implacable hostility towards the licensed trade, they said. This was an obvious swipe at the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association, which was thriving in Ireland at the time, with an estimated membership of a quarter of a million.

They decided to stick the boot into the Pioneers in their annual report of 1932: "The activities of the various temperance bodies abate not a jot, and a stranger unacquainted with the actual condition would be excused for thinking that the country was steeped in drink.

"Resolutions of the various temperance leagues and societies asking for further restrictions flow merrily forth, and scarce a day passes without press reports of some of these people's activities. The explanation is not far to seek.

"It is that in reality there is no temperance in the literal sense of the word. All the efforts of these people tend in one direction only and aim at one goal, and that is the total suppression of the liquor trade. If the laws were such that licensed houses were open only four hours a day, they would still be active as ever. The more they get, the more they want.

"Under the act of 1924, only eight short years ago, the legal hours in the Metropolitan area were reduced by twenty-four hours per week, and the 1927 Act, with the establishment of the afternoon closing hour, sliced off an additional six hours per week. In other words, within eight years, in the cities of Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Waterford, no less than thirty legal hours per week were taken from the trade."

The Pioneers remained implacably opposed to pubs opening on St Patrick's Day, and their rallies in the Gaiety Theatre in the early 1930s heard resolutions decrying the attempt by the LVA to supposedly desecrate the feast day. In April 1931, representatives from over 300 Pioneer centres were present at the Gaiety and expressed determined opposition to any changes in the licensing laws, quoting support from six Irish Catholic bishops and branches of both the GAA and Gaelic League.

Fr Murnane, the parish priest in Greystones, Co Wicklow, went so far as to assert that all the leaders of the 1916 Rising had been Pioneers! Others in the Pioneer Association denounced the "tap-room" politics operated by the licensed trade and classed as cowards those who would hide behind a party whip if the issue came to a vote in the Dáil. Although the Pioneer Association was avowedly non-political, it justified sending circulars to TDs requesting they oppose any future opening of the pubs on St Patrick's Day on the grounds that this was a religious and national rather than political issue.

The LVA did not get the ban overturned at this point, but the Pioneers were to discover that their ability to influence the legislature had its limitations, and that when it came to lobbying, they had more than met their match in the licensed trade. A Bill introduced in the Dáil in 1941 not only allowed for pubs to open on St Patrick's Day, but also provided for increased hours of trade on Sundays. At the Pioneers' AGM that year, the Bill was referred to as "a crippled child". It was just one of many battles that the drink sellers won decisively.p