‘Prohibition is coming to Ireland’, says American campaigner Pussyfoot Johnson
Dublin, 28 October 1919 - The American prohibition campaigner, William ‘Pussyfoot’ Johnson, arrived in Dublin yesterday and declared that ‘prohibition is coming to Ireland’.
Speaking from a city centre office building where he met with several businessmen and some members of the clergy, Mr Johnson expressed confidence in the prospects of the prohibition movement in Ireland:
‘I believe if the Irish people could handle this thing for themselves they would settle it by direct prohibition. They might not do it all at once, as we have done, but I believe they will do it, as we have done in America, because America is more or less Irish.’
Mr Johnson’s first stop in Ireland was in Belfast where he
spoke at a prohibition meeting held under the auspices of the
Ulster Temperance Council. He talked about the spread of
prohibition principles into Canada and across Scandanavia, and
remarked that in America there was nothing to stop any man from
getting drunk in his own home, but when he did in a public place
and made a nuisance of himself he went to jail.
He later met with a group of Belfast businessmen and described the
positive effects of the American prohibition experience: in those
towns where it was in force, the police now had nothing to do and
the taxpayer had less to pay.
During his trip Johnson has stressed that prohibitionist laws did not interfere with any useful purpose to which alcohol might be put in manufacturing or in medicine; they aimed solely to prohibit the business of making a man drunk for profit.
[Editor's note: This is an article from Century Ireland, a fortnightly online newspaper, written from the perspective of a journalist 100 years ago, based on news reports of the time.]
