Criminal Irish Drunkards

The Inebriate Reformatory System 1900-1920

Conor Reidy

• Publisher: THP Ireland
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781845888350
• eBook ISBN: 9780750959803
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

Offering a unique insight into the habitual inebriate offender class in Ireland, this book examines the inebriate reformatory system in Ireland from its foundation in 1900 until its closure in 1920 and the three institutions charged with punishing or rehabilitating habitual drunkards: The State Inebriate Reformatory, The Certified Inebriate Reformatory and The Voluntary Inebriate Retreat. Using registers of inmates, annual reports, court cases and institutional records, Conor Reidy presents a stark account of the ways in which alcohol addiction and lack of opportunity condemned countless Irish victims to lives of poverty, misery and crime in the early twentieth century. The author also looks at the ways in which institutional staff sought to exact reform over the inmates through education, training, religion and discipline. This book profiles a hitherto little?known system, giving it a place within the historiography of Ireland's complex web of so-called reformative institutions.

1

Towards the inebriate reformatory: policy and progress 1800–1900

The nineteenth century was marked by a series of political actions and religious movements which demonised alcohol and isolated the criminal drunkard. The century gave rise to a range of social, political and policy developments concerning the consumption of alcohol and its influence on criminality in Ireland. A number of discourses dominated the social and political classes as Irish society sought to understand the problem of excessive drinking and devise appropriate remedies. The chapter will open by identifying the state of political awareness of alcoholism in early nineteenth-century Britain. The work of the Select Committee on Inquiry into Drunkenness (1834) provides a starting point as this was the first coherent enunciation of ideas on the causes and effects of excessive alcohol consumption on the so-called labouring classes, and by extension, society as a whole. Many members of Irish political, social and administrative life held strong views on the effects of alcohol, particularly its consequences for the prison system. Accounts of alcohol-related problems and their potential solutions were widespread both in the bourgeoning penal system and in the hallowed forum of the Dublin Statistical Society. This contemporary commentary will also be considered here. Although the temperance movement did not directly lead to the creation of the inebriate reformatory system, it was no doubt influential in providing an outlet for those with ideas on change. The second half of the century in particular gave rise to legislation that eventually led to the passing of the Inebriates Act 1898 which criminalised and detained habitual drunkards who committed offences related to their alcoholism. This manifested itself in the state inebriate and certified reformatory system whereby courts were empowered to detain the newly formed class of habitual criminal drunkard. In Ireland, the State Inebriate Reformatory was established in the west of the country in the town of Ennis in County Clare in 1899.

THE DRUNKEN COMMITTEE

One of the first significant public efforts to assess the state of alcohol consumption in Britain came in 1834 with the Report of the Select Committee on Inquiry into Drunkenness, known in short as the ‘Drunken Committee’. The committee was established and chaired by James Silk Buckingham, a recently elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Sheffield with an appetite for social reform. The report described its remit as being ‘appointed to inquire into the extent, causes and consequences of the prevailing vice of intoxication among the labouring classes of the United Kingdom’.1 This was with a view to establishing whether legislation could or should be devised to counter any problems identified. Buckingham became interested in the field of intemperance as a social ill after returning from a decade overseas. On arriving home, he found a country that he believed possessed certain attitudes and institutions which accepted higher levels of drunkenness. His idea for a parliamentary inquiry was met with some derision in the House of Commons, however, as it was only in the 1830s that alcoholism was first seen as a condition that could be cured or prevented.2 Although it may have been ridiculed from the outset by various parties, the committee and its report were nevertheless significant as this was the first occasion that ideas about the consumption of alcohol as a social problem were drawn together in a formal expression for public discussion.

The first finding of the committee declared that intoxication had decreased during previous years among the upper classes of society but had increased ‘among the labouring classes’ of England, Scotland and Ireland. Men, women and children were described as its ‘victims’. The presence of alcohol at every significant family event, including baptisms, marriages, funerals, anniversaries and holidays, was seen as a factor promoting its use and further spreading drunkenness. The committee also criticised the wider availability of alcohol, claiming that temptation was now more prevalent than ever with one retail outlet for every twenty families throughout the United Kingdom.3 Some of the most significant conclusions were presented in the committee’s analysis of the effects of drunkenness on the person.

Referring again to the lower classes, the report listed many health-related problems that were caused by excessive alcohol use. These included ‘premature decrepitude in the old; stunted growth, and general debility and decay in the young; loss of life by paroxysms, apoplexies, drowning, burnings, and accidents of various kinds’. The list included violence and different forms of madness. Indeed, mental health was singled out as being particularly affected by drunkenness given that one’s aptitude for learning could be reduced, and this was linked to the ability to engage in any ‘useful art or industrious occupation’. The moral fibre of the individual was also undermined according to the report. Hatred, anger, revenge and the ‘extinction of all moral and religious principle, a lack of truth and an absence of shame would all come to the fore’.4 The language of the report was uncompromising as it sought to emphasise the notion of alcohol consumption as a damaging activity, particularly among those who could least afford it.

The final part of the report of concern to this study is its commentary on the effects of excessive alcohol consumption on the national interest.5 Curiously, the first such point focussed on the impact on the grain crop ‘given by a bountiful Providence’ only to be converted ‘into a poison’. It was also pointed out that as a result of the consumption of this ‘poison’, there was a loss of ‘productive labour’ across every sector of the economy. The report claimed that £1 million out of every £6 million that was produced was either ‘retarded or suppressed’ because of drunkenness. The effects were particularly difficult for the agricultural sector which depended on skilled and sober labourers. The navy and army were also weakened by the over-use of alcohol according to the evidence of senior officers from both branches of the armed forces. The reputation of the kingdom overseas was damaged by the vice of alcohol, and the collective bodily strength of the population was diminished due to the ‘loss of personal beauty, the decline of health and the progressive decay’ of the person.6 The inquiry and its subsequent report were ridiculed at the time, largely because of a somewhat bemused and elitist attitude towards Buckingham. As Harrison correctly points out, however, many of the report’s findings were ‘remarkably imaginative for their day’.7 Much of the analysis of this committee was revisited in various forms by future temperance campaigners and social reform inquiries, the difference being that Buckingham’s report was much more balanced and empirically rather than morally based.

SOME CONTEMPORARY PERCEPTIONS OF ALCOHOL AND CRIMINALITY

Many nineteenth-century prison reports made little reference to the presence of alcohol in penal institutions, instead focussing on gaols as places of punishment for drink-related criminality. Prison officials in Ireland, however, had identified the problems of alcohol in gaols since the eighteenth century. Kilmainham was Dublin’s county gaol and one of Ireland’s landmark penal institutions. Design flaws in the building ensured that prisoners were kept in a continued state of drunkenness because the windows of the cells opened directly onto the street. Those on the outside were also able to smuggle in a constant flow of alcohol as well as ‘instruments’ to help the inmates escape.8 An early official report on the nineteenth-century Irish prison system reveals a startling fact about its relationship with alcohol.

Published in 1809, the Report from the Commissioners appointed to enquire into and inspect the condition and government of the state prisons and other gaols in Ireland was essentially a critique of the existing prison system with a primary focus on institutions in Dublin. In the section dealing with the Sheriff’s Prison for debtors in Dublin, the commissioners pointed out that previous legislation on the presence of taps (presumably for the distribution of alcohol) in such establishments was not necessarily clear. Taps remained in use in debtors’ prisons, resulting in ‘riots and disorder of every species’. The report warned that only the complete removal of taps from prisons would be adequate. Further, it highlighted the need for clearer regulations ‘restraining the consumption of wine and malt liquors within reasonable bounds’.9 The commissioners went on to offer the regulations in operation in Gloucester gaol as a possible template for Ireland. In Gloucester no prisoner was permitted to send for or consume more than 1 pint of wine or 1 quart of beer in any 1 day or 24-hour period. Non-adherence to these rules, including using another prisoner’s name to obtain alcohol, could lead to the withdrawal of a certificate of good behaviour.10 A decade later, the Sheriff’s Prison was again singled out in the Inspector General’s report on the state of prisons in Ireland. ‘Much disorder frequently prevails in this prison’, claims the report, ‘from the smuggling in of spirits’. It declared that this can only be stopped by removing the individuals doing the smuggling from the prison altogether.11 Nothing was officially reported about further sanctions imposed on those in receipt of illicit alcohol or indeed the smugglers themselves, but it can be assumed that over-worked and often corrupt gaolers and turnkeys had little interest in the further administrative headaches involved in such potential prosecutions.

Incarcerated criminals were not the only members of the prison community under scrutiny for illicit alcohol consumption. In 1854, the newly formed Directors of Convict Prisons (Ireland) revealed that an unspecified number of warders had been dismissed during the previous year because they were intoxicated while on duty. This was an offence, they stated, that could ‘not be tolerated for an instant in a prison where a good moral example should operate as one of the principal elements of reformation’.12 The Directors of Convict Prisons was established in 1854 to oversee the country’s convict prisons such as Mountjoy and Spike Island in Cork harbour. The local prisons did not yet come under its remit, but this was, nonetheless, a significant move towards the centralisation of the penal system.13 As Prior points out, the second half of the century was one of political and social turbulence in Ireland and noted for an increasing level of bureaucratic regulation from London.14 In the same 1854 report, it was mentioned that up to that point, officers found guilty of drunkenness on duty were sent to do duty at Spike Island. This sanction was ‘calculated to degrade the character of the officers generally, to lower them in the estimation of the convicts, and lessen their authority and control’.15 This might now seem to have been counter-productive, given that a penal institution would surely function more effectively if the officers commanded the respect of the prisoners. It was a manner of thinking that appears to reflect the sometimes unenlightened approach that was actually uncharacteristic of nineteenth-century Irish penal administrators. Apart from the following 2 years, subsequent reports from the directors made little or n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Chronology
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Towards the Inebriate Reformatory: Policy and Progress 1800-1900
• 2 The State Inebriate Reformatory in Ennis: Foundation, Daily Life and Control
• 3 The Certified Reformatories in Wexford and Waterford
• 4 ‘The Little Retreat in Belfast’: The Lodge Certified Inebriate Retreat
• 5 The men of Ennis Inebriate Reformatory
• 6 The Women of Ennis Inebriate Reformatory
• 7 ‘Drink-sodden and Partially Demented Parents’: Urban Inebriate Mothers and Their Child Victims
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Plates
• Copyright