IRISH LICENSING LAW.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume VIII, Issue 408, 19 May 1898, Page 16

IRISH LICENSING LAW.

A short time ago we noted some peculiarities of the licensing law prevailing in England and Scotland. A glance at the Irish evidence taken by the Royal Commission on Licensing during the early part of last month reveals the fact that the licensing law of Ireland is no whit less confusing than that administered in Great Britain. So long ago as 1877 Mr Justice Fitzgerald said that the provisions of the numerous statutes were so uncertain and contradictory that it was extremely difficult to carry them into effect, and it is said that there are no less than twenty liquor licenses granted by thirty different statutes, the judge’s remarks on the licensing law of the Emerald Isle can be easily understood. Since 1877 nothing has been done to remedy this confusing state of affairs, and now, as then, the complexity of publican’s law keeps many a man from following a trade for which he may possess a natural ability. These twenty licenses may be divided into three classes, the first being those which can be granted on a justice’s certificate only, and they are the’ publican’s license, the publican’s occasional license, the canteen license, the spirit grocer’s license, the wholesale beerddaler’s license, and the beer-retailer’s license. The refreshment-house keeper’s license is the only one in the second class, and for this a certificate is not necessary, but the magistrates have power to oppose it if they wish to do so.. The third class includes the wholesale spirit dealer’s license, the sale of foreign liquors license, the wine dealer’s license, the shopkeeper’s retail wine license, the wholesale sweet dealer’s license, the retail sweets license, the passenger vessel license, and the theatre license. The first five in the third class are off-licenses, the others are granted for the sale of liquor to be consumed on the premises. The thirty statutes which grant the above licenses are so beset with legal points that it requires a finely-discriminating mind to avoid all the pitfalls, any one of which may bury the unwary up to the neck in trouble. To point the moral we may mention the case of a Scotsman who paid £4OOO for the license of a public-house in Ireland. His first application for the transfer failed because he was a resident in Scotland ; a second time the transfer was refused because the manager, in whose name the application was made, was not a householder The purchaser is now making another attempt to be allowed to deal with his own property. Meanwhile he can only sit down and twiddle his thumbs and wait for the good time coming. The grocer’s spirit license, which was originally granted in 1791 so that people could obtain spirituous liquor without going to an inn for it, is a prolific source of drunkenness, particularly amongst women In the city of Belfast alone there are over four hundred of these grocers’s licenses, and the harm they do is incalculable, for where a woman becomes a victim of the drink craze she is enabled to get the spirits put down as general groceries,. and the husband may never know of the evil until too late. On the question of Sunday closing, the police and magisterial witnesses are in accord in declaring that the present custom of opening on the Sabbath from two o’clock till seven o’clock should '•not be altered. They are of opinion that absolute closing on Sunday would only lead to more surreptitious drinking and,

consequently, more drunkenness It would do the prohibitionists of New Zealand some good if they were to read the evidence taken by the Royal Commission. They would learn that the spirit of toleration is shown even by the strongest opponents of the liquor trade, for the latter have come to recognise the fact that nothing is to be gained by a wholesale denunciation of the trade and of the men engaged in it, who, as a rule, take every care to conduct their most tiying business in a creditable and decorous manner.