The Irish claim to the invention of distillation is old and, like most such claims, difficult to settle. The word whiskey derives from the Gaelic uisce beatha, a translation of the Latin aqua vitae. What is certain is that by the 12th century Irish monasteries were distilling for medicinal and liturgical purposes, and by the 16th century whiskey was a familiar part of Irish domestic life.
Legal distillation in Ireland was formalised earlier than in Scotland. By the mid-19th century, Dublin had become one of the great whiskey capitals of the world, and Irish whiskey outsold Scotch across the British Empire and beyond. The Dublin distilleries — Jameson, Powers, Roe and Williams — were vast industrial concerns, and Irish single pot still whiskey was widely considered the finest style then produced.
That dominance did not last. A combination of factors — the Irish War of Independence, the loss of the British Empire market, American Prohibition, and the rise of Scottish blended whisky produced cheaply using the column still — reduced the Irish industry to a fraction of its former size. By the 1960s only a handful of distilleries remained in operation across the entire island.
An industry does not die easily where the memory of it is kept alive in every parish.
In 1966 the surviving southern producers merged to form Irish Distillers, consolidating production at a new complex at Midleton in County Cork. Bushmills continued in the north. For a time the industry survived rather than flourished.
The revival began quietly in the 1980s and gathered pace through the 1990s and 2000s. New distilleries opened for the first time in generations, and Single Pot Still whiskey — the style once thought lost — was carefully brought back to prominence, most visibly through the Redbreast and Green Spot bottlings.
Ireland today has more working distilleries than at any point in the last century. The industry that seemed nearly extinct within living memory is once again vigorous, and the historical map of Irish whiskey is being redrawn.