Drinking Tea in Ireland - Harmful for your Health?

Any time we visited my grandmother in Limerick, we would be greeted with a cup of tea, a familiar experience for anyone living or traveling in Ireland. Like bread and salt in olden days, the cup of tea is part of making someone feel welcome and safe. It is difficult to imagine Ireland without tea. And yet there was a time when drinking tea was considered harmful for your health and detrimental to society. Researcher Helen O'Connell of Durham University studied pamphlets from the early 1800s and found writers chastising Irish women for sipping tea instead of working in the home and preparing supper for their husbands. Apparently, these reformers felt concerned about alleged addictive qualities of tea and compared it to the Chinese using opium. Authors warned that Ireland would never be able to emerge from poverty if women continued to drink two cups of tea a day. Just as many Chinese had become addicted and subsequently lethargic, the Irish were in danger of remaining backward and a liability to the British Empire.

Remember, the British Empire forced China to allow the import of opium from plantations in India. London did not want to spend precious silver to buy luxury items in high demand at home, such as silk from China. As a consequence Britain became the largest drug-dealing state the world had known. At the same time, middle-class reformers worried about the Irish drinking too much tea.

Pamphlets from the early 1800s describe the dangers of tea-drinking similar to drug abuse: addiction, passivity, moral decline. Impoverished people would ruin their entire life by pursuing their desire for tea. One pamphlet in 1811 by reformer and writer, Mary Leadbeater, tells the story of two female friends. Rose warns her friend Nancy that 'must not every poor man's wife work in and out of doors, and do all she can to help her husband? And do you think you can afford tea, on thirteen pence a day? Put that out of your head entirely, Nancy; give up the tea for good and all.'