1923

The evil drink

At the beginning of the New Year, Very Rev. Dr. Coffey, President of the Catholic Total Abstinence Federation, writing from Maynooth College, puts a problem before the Irish people that they will have to face immediately.

What, he asks in effect, are we going to do about the drink evil that is growing in our midst spreading demoralisation where there are already too many causes for it, about the wholesale manufacture of potheen, the increase in shebeening, and the distribution of methylated sprits to craving inebriates in the lanes of our cities?

We think, if we may say so, at once, that it is time men like Dr. Coffey, not merely in Maynooth, but all over Ireland, did something about it. Shebeening has been rampant throughout the West of Ireland; potheen-making has sapped the energy and the vitality of half the parishes in Connemara. What has been done, is being done, about it?

Since the Civic Guards came to Galway, there have been wholesale prosecutions, exemplary fines; as we write on Thursday of this week a number of prosecutions are being heard at Oughterard District Court.

The Civic Guards are doing their utmost in the face of unexampled difficulties to stamp out the evil, and they are being supported by the district justices. But they have to eradicate and evil that has been permitted to take deep root during the past six years.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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