Last chance saloon for the Pioneers?
Damian Corless on why the no-drinking body is appealing for money
In 1959, some 100,000 people crammed into Croke Park to celebrate the 60th birthday of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association (PTAA) in a carnival of prayer and song. It was an impressive turnout, but it represented just a fraction of those who'd solemnly pledged to forego drink and who had the Pioneer Pin to prove it.
Today, if every Pioneer in Ireland gathered in Croke Park they might just about fill the place.
"We've reached crisis point," chief executive Padraig Brady said this week, appealing to members to donate at least €10 each towards the body's survival.
"This is the first time ever we've made a direct financial appeal to members, but we've had more outgoings than incomings in recent years. We're living on money saved for a rainy day and it's about to run out."
This year, the Association will sell 16-20,000 Pioneer Pins featuring the Sacred Heart at €5 each, but sales are dipping. Income from collections and magazine subscriptions is also down. The Association faces a shortfall of €100,000 this year.
Brady concedes this decline in the Pioneers' fortunes "didn't happen overnight. It certainly goes back to the early 1970s".
The Association's slow retreat is in sharp contrast to its rapid expansion. The PTAA began life in Dublin's Gardiner Street in 1898, the brainchild of Fr James Cullen who pined for the 'Ireland Sober, Ireland Free' Temperance rallies of Fr Theobald Matthew some 50 years earlier.
At the time of that first meeting, Gardiner Street was at the sooty heart of Monto, the rundown red-light district where every second doorway led to a shebeen or a brothel.
Under Cullen's autocratic rule, the PTAA tapped into the Catholic Nationalist mood of the time and quickly attracted large numbers of converts to its lectures, alcohol-free dances, pilgrimages, prayer meetings and table quizzes.
But for Cullen, the battle against the bottle was just stage one of his grand plan. He was mobilising a crusade to forge a better Irish society that would be pure of mind and spirit, as God intended.
Schoolchildren aged around 12 were invited to take the pledge at their Confirmation, but the Association also put great store on cultivating membership and influence in key bodies like the Garda, the Army, political parties and the GAA.
By mid-century, the crusade had helped create a strange partition in Irish society, much remarked upon by foreign visitors, where falling-down drunkenness and upstanding sobriety co-existed under an uneasy truce.
As recently as 2006, the compilers of an EU survey were struck by the fact that the proportion of Irish men who completely abstain from drink and drugs is the highest in Europe at 10pc, while 20pc of women in our drink-sodden society are teetotal.
The Association rose to a position of power and influence largely by the deft application of peer pressure, and peer pressure persuaded most begrudgers to hold their tongue.
Most, but not all. When 80,000 Pioneers brought Dublin to a standstill for the Association's Golden Jubilee in 1949, Ireland's most enthusiastic drinker, Flann O'Brien, vented his spleen at what he saw as a bunch of Holy Joes flaunting their piety.
He wrote: "Dublin's working man with his wife and four children intent on spending a day at the seaside does not have to journey to Croke Park to prove that he is not a slave to whiskey. I can recall nothing comparable to yesterday's procedure and I hope somebody will examine the legality of it.
"If the abstainers are entitled to disrupt transport in their own peculiar and selfish interest, there is no reason in the world why the drinking men of Ireland should not demand and be given the same right.
"Let everybody stay at home because the boozers are in town! I would advise these Pioneer characters that there is more in life than the bottle, that fair play to others is important and that temperance -- taking the word in its big and general value -- is a thing they might strive to cultivate a bit better."
If he was around today, O'Brien might concede that the Pioneers do now keep a more temperate and less strident profile than they did back when Ireland was an ardent Catholic state.
While lifelong abstinence is still the ideal, the byword is moderation. People can even sign up on a temporary basis to abstain for Lent, the month of November, or other short periods. But the main source of recruitment is still the Confirmation ritual.
Regarding signing up immature minds, Padraig Brady says: "Nothing happens without the parents. Often they'll want to get their kids safely to a certain stage in life, and taking the pledge can help get them through the difficult teens. Often we find that the best parents are themselves moderate drinkers."
The appeal for funds is urgent, he says, because: "Moving along is very expensive. The wind is blowing with us and we want to get out and be proactive with our message to society that there is choice in life."
Originally published in
