Mathew’s Passion
Father Mathew’s Crusade by John F. Quinn
Father Mathew’s Crusade: Temperance in Nineteenth-Century Ireland
and Irish America
University of Massachusetts Press, 2002
(256 pages, $20.95, paperback)
reviewed by Mike Aquilina
Take heart, culture warriors. If you think you can’t change public opinion or widespread vices—never mind city hall—read John F. Quinn’s excellent study of the nineteenth-century Irish temperance preacher Father Theobald Mathew. In Ireland in the 1830s, per capita annual consumption of beer and whiskey hovered around 3.5 gallons of each. In 1825, when a temperance group in Ulster tried to limit the . . .
