Puritanic Street Preachers

Oh, Christmas! Around the corner, just like that! Amazing! It was summer just the other week! Well, I drove out of Dublin airport last Wednesday and they were putting up the Christmas trees and plugging in the lights, so it must be true.

It’s a time when reason is suspended, isn’t it? Parents allow their children to believe in Santa Claus even though the parents themselves don’t believe in the Loch Ness monster, or God for that matter, in many cases.
But it’s also a time when other things are suspended. You can trace it back to whoever it was that lived here thousands of years ago and figured out the sun and the seasons. This low point of the year, this season of long nights and mists and chills, courses through our culture as it does the marrow in our bones, and shapes and bounds the way we celebrate the winter solstice.
Feasting and intoxication are pretty central to mid-winter celebrations and always have been. It’s a common culture across all northern countries, including Canada and the United States. All these are historically Protestant countries. Ireland both is and isn’t an exception to this.
Many social historians argue that after the Act of Union, the small emergent Irish strong farmers and middle class set out to prove they were ‘as good as’ the Protestant middle class of the day and did so by adopting the same narrow, puritanical attitudes. Yes, a different and far more humane Protestantism came later and for much of the 20th century Protestants showed Catholics how to be Christian. But back then it was pretty humourless.
Before this unholy alliance, the Irish had been as comfortable as the French or Italians with pleasures of the flesh. All changed. Think, if you will, of the great film Babette’s Feast if the villagers won, not the food and drink.
A separate but complementary force arrived with a cadre of Jansenist priests in Maynooth. It created a perfect storm of puritan totalitarianism that lasted until the 1970s. And it meant that the Irish were Catholics by institution but puritan Protestant in attitudes.
It wasn’t universally welcomed. Temperance is a core value of Puritanism and Ireland produced its own temperance hero in Father Mathew of Cork. But he was regarded by some bishops as ‘suspiciously Protestant…’
How right they were!!
Well, moral panics are also part of that old 19th century Protestant ethic and at the moment we’re in the middle of a classic moral panic. Drinking is the sin of the times.
True! Sex is, like, totally passé! Everything’s been done every which way but loose. And they’ve talked about it on the Late Late or the Biddy Early or The Two Red Tops. ‘I’m a sheepshagger, get me in there!!’ Who cares? But get drunk in public and blimey, all hell breaks loose.
Modern temperance campaigners like to quote 19th century visitors on the excesses of the Irish in drink. They are trying to say that we have a wayward genetic disposition to get drunk and fight. But the people they quote were almost all English Protestant clergy, who also wrote the same things about the Scots and the Welsh – and indeed about English peasants too.
Figures are produced that purportedly show that we drink more and binge more and generally excess more than anyone else on earth, give or take.
For example, it was recently reported that alcohol consumption here rose by 17% between 1995 and 2004. Yeah? This figure derives from a simple sum – all the alcohol sold in the country divided by the population. But the latter is estimated and doesn’t include the massive influx of people, mostly single and from Eastern Europe, almost all in the heavy drinking 18-30 age range, who came here in the late ’90s. On the other hand, all the pints they drink, and those of the increasing number of tourists too, are counted! What’s more, it doesn’t factor in the fact that more people are working – and therefore have the money to drink. Nor does it allow for the fact that women once spent their lives at home and generally drank less for the simple reason that they were like prisoners there for most of the week. In other words, it’s a load of unscientific nonsense.
You have to compare like with like. As the economist Danny McCoy revealed in the Irish Times last year, the way we calculate consumption is different to others. We include everything, others don’t. And some countries that appear to drink less have other variables, like rising numbers of Muslims who don’t drink.
Enough!! H.L. Mencken’s definition of a puritan is a person who has an overwhelming suspicion that somewhere, someone is having fun.
We’ve got our problems, sure, but on the whole, we’re okay. Like the rest of the northern world, and shaped by our climate and our seasons, we’ve adapted the ethic of working hard and playing hard. And midwinter is a time for play.
Look, the goose is as fat as its going to get. Leaner years are coming. So let’s have a good time this Christmas. Just remember the Hog’s six golden rules and you’ll get through it.
• First, don’t drink much before eating. You get drunk too quick and early and it ruins the lining of your stomach.
• Second, pace yourself. In Sweden now they talk about the ‘party method’. They accept that a lot of people are going to get drunk, so they encourage them to alternate drink and water. That way they get drunk but not helpless, the night lasts longer and they don’t feel so bad next day.
• Third, know your limits. We’re all different. We don’t all have to keep pace. And it’s okay to leave pints behind. We’re not so poor now as to have to drain every glass.
• Fourth, don’t drink to the point where you say (or do) really stupid things. Well, okay… don’t do it too often! But if you vomit on your friends or fall over in a heap, you’ve had way too much. And it’s very, very uncool.
• Fifth, be very careful mixing drink and drugs. Coke may give you a major buzz and keep you going longer, but if the mood changes you can get very edgy altogether. Too much drink clouds your judgement and signals get confused. Too much of both leads to arguments and fights and maybe to knives and appalling deeds indeed. Suspend anything except your brain.
• Finally, don’t drive if you’ve had more than two drinks, especially if it’s late and you’re tired and you’ve any serious distance to travel…even if your best friend offers you a line of coke ‘to keep you going’.
Stick with these and we’ll all ring in a very merry, non-puritan, new year!