Father Mathew

At the head of St Patrick's Street stands a figure Corkonians call simply the Statue. It is Father Theobald Mathew, and at one point in the 1840s he had persuaded more than half the adults in Ireland to give up drink. No reformer before or since has moved a country so far, so fast, with nothing but a pledge and his own conviction.

The pledge

Mathew was born in Tipperary in 1790 and ordained a Capuchin friar in 1814. He came to Cork and spent his life among its poorest streets. In 1838 a friend pressed him to lead a temperance campaign, and he answered with a line that became famous in the city: "Here goes, in the name of God." He took the pledge himself and asked others to follow. They came in their tens of thousands. Within a few years his Total Abstinence movement had enrolled some three million people across Ireland, more than half the adult population, and had spread to Britain and America.

More than temperance

The pledge was the headline, but Mathew did far more. He worked through the cholera epidemic of 1832 and through the Great Famine that began in 1845, feeding and burying the poor when official help came slowly. He opened St Joseph's Cemetery so the poor of Cork could be buried with some dignity. He ran himself and his money into the ground doing it, and he died in debt.

The movement did not outlast him by much. The Famine scattered the people who had taken the pledge, and the temperance societies faded as the country emptied. Yet the memory held. For decades afterwards Corkonians spoke of the years of Father Mathew as a time when the city had pulled itself together, and his name stayed on the lips of reformers across Ireland, Britain and America. He carried the pledge to the United States in person, where he met President Polk and toured for two years, preaching to the Irish emigrants in the cities they had crossed to. He had shown that an ordinary priest, with no power but persuasion, could move millions.

The Statue

Mathew died in 1856. His funeral was the largest the city had seen, with some fifty thousand mourners following him to St Joseph's. Eight years later Cork set him at the head of its main street, in a statue begun by the sculptor John Hogan and finished by John Henry Foley after Hogan's death. He has pointed down Pana ever since, and the church he raised, Holy Trinity, still stands on the quay that carries his name.

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.