Father Mathew

At the head of St Patrick's Street stands a figure Corkonians call simply the Statue. Tell a taxi driver to meet you at the Statue and he will not ask which one. It is Father Theobald Mathew, a Capuchin friar who, for a few years in the 1840s, had persuaded more than half the adults in Ireland to give up drink. He did it with nothing but a pledge and his own conviction: no law behind him, no funding, and no great enthusiasm from his bishops.

The pledge

Mathew was born in Tipperary in 1790, was ordained a Capuchin in 1814 and came to Cork the same year, and spent the rest of his life in its poorest streets. In April 1838 a Quaker friend, William Martin, pressed him to lead a temperance campaign, and he answered with a line the city still repeats: "Here goes, in the name of God." He signed the pledge himself and asked others to follow. They came in their tens of thousands, walking into Cork from the country to kneel in front of him in the street and take it. Within a few years his Total Abstinence movement had enrolled something like three million people across Ireland, more than half the adult population, and whiskey production in the country fell by half. He carried it to Britain and then to America, where he toured for two years, preached to the emigrant Irish in every city they had crossed to, and was received at the White House.

More than temperance

The pledge was the headline, but Mathew did a great deal more. He nursed the city through the cholera of 1832 and through the Famine that began in 1845, feeding and burying the poor when official help came slowly. He had opened St Joseph's Cemetery in the old Botanic Gardens in 1830 so that the poor of Cork could be buried with some dignity, and in the Famine years it filled fast. He spent his own money and other people's on all of it, ran himself and his health into the ground, and died in debt. The movement did not outlast him by much. The Famine scattered the people who had taken the pledge and the temperance halls emptied as the country did. What held was the memory, and the fact that an ordinary priest with no power but persuasion had moved millions.

The Statue

Mathew died in Queenstown in December 1856, and his funeral was the largest the city had ever seen, with some fifty thousand people following him out to St Joseph's. Eight years later Cork put him at the head of its main street, in a bronze by John Henry Foley unveiled in 1864, with his right hand raised as if he were still administering the pledge. He has pointed down Pana ever since, through the burning of 1920 and every rebuilding since, and the city gives directions by him. The church he raised for his parish, Holy Trinity, still stands on the quay that carries his name, and there is a Father Mathew Street too. Not bad for a man who asked people to stop enjoying themselves.

On the walk

We stop at the Statue at the top of Pana and tell the story of the priest who emptied Cork's pubs, fed the city through the Famine, and was carried to his grave by fifty thousand people.