Story: Liquor laws

In 1856 Weslyan minister Samuel Ironside of New Plymouth submitted a petition to the Taranaki Provincial Council requesting that pubs shut on Sundays – the ‘Lord’s Day’. This would ‘tend materially to lessen the evil of intemperance, and to promote the peace and good order of the community’. Ironside’s petition was not immediately successful, but Taranaki eventually did ban Sunday trading, along with most other provincial councils in the 1860s.