Peter Molloy

Peter Molloy, the father of Mikey Molloy, is known as a champion of pub drinking, but his reputation rests on a grotesque trick: he wins drinking bets by making himself vomit so he can begin another round. The money he wins does not reach his family. When he drinks the dole as well, Nora Molloy is left to feed their five children and sometimes breaks down under the strain. His story makes the consequences of drinking visible not as private excess alone but as hunger borne by a household.

Identity and Reputation

Peter’s boastful standing in the pubs is built around endurance and evasion. He can drink more pints than anyone, then bring them back up in the jakes and start again; eventually, he can do it without using his finger. The narrator calls him a champion, but the title is bitterly comic: his drinking skill brings in winnings while his family sees none of them.

The distance between public prowess and domestic responsibility defines Peter’s place in the family’s story. Sometimes he spends the dole money on drink, leaving Nora desperate and the children at risk of hunger. His pub triumphs therefore have a direct household cost: money enters his hands, but does not become food for his children.

The Household Cost of Drinking

When Peter drinks the dole, Nora anticipates being taken away to the asylum and tries to make provision for the children before she goes. She roams Limerick begging for flour—from priests, nuns, Protestants, Quakers, and Rank’s Flour Mills—and bakes through the night. Her children run around covered in flour, and the bread accumulates faster than they can eat it. Peter asks her to stop because it will go stale, but she answers that this is what comes of drinking the dole.

The bread episode lays out the household’s crisis in practical detail. Mikey, bothered by the waste, learns from a woman with a cookbook to make bread pudding from the hard loaves, water, sour milk, and sugar. That food sustains the children during the fortnight Nora is in the asylum. Peter’s drinking is thus linked to a sequence of consequences: the dole disappears, Nora prepares for her absence, and Mikey takes on yet another task of keeping the family fed.

Family Relationships and Religious Anxiety

Mikey is the counterpoint to Peter’s drinking. At eleven, he earns money by delivering coal in a borrowed handcart and running errands, then gives what he makes to Nora. Peter, by contrast, wins money at the pubs but does not bring it home. The contrast is especially sharp because Mikey’s labor is modest and directed toward the family, while Peter’s celebrated drinking skill leaves his children hungry.

Nora’s worry for Mikey is entwined with Catholic fears about his recurring fits and his inability to receive First Communion: he spits out attempts to practice swallowing a wafer because he fears choking. She fears what might happen to him in the next life if he dies with sin on his soul. Mikey counters that God would not give him fits and then send him to hell. Peter contributes to this exchange with an irreverent joke: he tells Mikey that Jesus did not become a proper Catholic until the Last Supper, when he was thirty-three. Nora objects to Peter’s nickname for Mikey, but Peter, like her brother Pa Keating, does not care what the world says.

Narrative Role

The narrator’s father asks whether Nora is taken away because she has gone mad baking bread, or goes mad baking bread because she is about to be taken away. The question refuses a simple division between illness and circumstance; Nora’s frantic baking is both a response to her expected absence and part of the crisis that precedes it. Peter’s drinking sits at the center of that circular predicament, without the narrative reducing Nora’s suffering to a single cause.

Peter’s episodes also echo the narrator’s own family experience: the narrator observes that Peter sometimes drinks the dole just as his own father does. That parallel makes Peter more than a background figure in Mikey’s household. His behavior belongs to a wider pattern in which money intended for survival can vanish into drink, leaving wives and children to improvise food, care, and safety from what remains.