County Cork
Corcaigh
- IrishCorcaigh
- ProvinceMunster
- County townCork
- Local governmentCork City Council and Cork County Council
- Area7,501 km²
- Population584,156 (2022)
- Highest pointKnockboy, 704.8 m
Douglass takes the pledge
On the twentieth or the twenty first of October 1845 Frederick Douglass spoke at the Temperance Institute on Academy Street. The record gives both dates. His subject was intemperance and slavery. Father Mathew introduced him and the South Main Street Quadrille Band played.
The next morning Mathew had him to breakfast at his house. Douglass asked him there for the pledge, and was given a silver pledge.
It was not a conversion. He said so in the same address. That I am a teetotaler is most true. I have been a staunch one for some years. The pledge was a gesture between two reformers, not a change of life.
Cormac Óg
St Joseph's Cemetery
In the late 1820s every graveyard in Cork was under Protestant control, and a priest needed leave to bury a Catholic in one. Father Mathew watched the Protestant dean try to stop the Catholic dean at St Finbarr's.
So he raised a subscription and leased part of the old Botanic Gardens. The ground opened as St Joseph's Cemetery in February 1830.
He died at Queenstown on the eighth of December 1856. He was buried in the ground he had found.
Cormac Óg
Father Theobald Mathew
William Martin, a Cork Quaker, had worked the temperance cause for years and got nowhere. The people he needed were Catholic. He asked Mathew, and kept asking.
On the tenth of April 1838 Mathew signed the total abstinence pledge at a meeting in Cork. Here goes in the name of God, he is supposed to have said. He became president of the Cork Total Abstinence Society.
He travelled the country giving the pledge in the open air. He claimed millions. A careful modern count is nearer three million by the middle of the 1840s.
Cormac Óg
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Father Mathew spent twenty four years among the poor of Cork and founded the Cork Total Abstinence Society here in April 1838. He is buried in the graveyard he bought himself.