Wasted

by Brian O'Connell

  Contents

  Cover

  Title page

  Introduction

  1. Taken to the Sup

  2. I Said ‘Yes, Yes, Yes’

  Des Bishop

  3. A Day in the Life

  Frances Black

  4. Past Pioneers

  Mary Coughlan

  5. The Forgotten Irish

  John Leahy

  6. Guinness and Late Nights

  Mark O’Halloran

  7. Teenage Kicks and Night Raving

  Niall Toibin

  8. The State of Us

  Conclusion: Where to Next?

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  About the Author

  About Gill & Macmillan

  Introduction

  It seems strange saying this now, having invested the last year of my life writing and researching this book, but I never consciously planned on writing about either my own or Ireland’s association with alcohol. Same way, I suppose, I never intentionally set out to develop a drinking problem. Both just happened organically, taking me by surprise, leading me along a more scenic, albeit bumpier, route. The seed for this writing lies in an Irish Times article I wrote in 2008, which in turn followed a radio interview with Dave Fanning on the ‘Tubridy Show’ a little time earlier. I owe thanks to Tom Donnelly in RTÉ Radio for the platform to begin with and Shane Hegarty in the Irish Times for encouraging me to turn those initial comments into print.

  The reaction to both media outings, and to my thoughts on living sober in Ireland, seemed to strike a chord. I received dozens of letters and emails from a wide range of people, from 18-year-old teenagers to 80-year-old clergy, expressing support and telling me of their own struggles. Several of the letters and cards went unsigned, and simply offered messages of mutual understanding. I remember being at a social function some weeks after the Irish Times article appeared, and someone whom I had never met before told me of his own battles with alcohol, and the fact he felt unable to admit it or deal with it effectively. He was a respected member of his community, known as a ‘heavy drinker’, he said, and facilitated as such. He felt unable to discuss his inner torment with family or friends. We chatted for a while and then he returned to the bar. The image of him—bulk hunched and back turned—putting his arm around the shoulder of a fellow drinker as he took his seat at the counter stuck with me.

  Following this, I began to reflect on secrecy, alcohol and Irish society. How emotionally open and upfront have we really become as a society? Is it still taboo to admit defeat to something like alcohol in Ireland, and impossible not to feel socially scarred as a result? What difficulties arise as a result of the interaction between society and sobriety in twenty-first-century Ireland? Are problem drinkers born or do they develop and evolve over time? Is there a place for the non-drinker in Irish social life? These were all the initial questions, flirting for answers in the back of my mind. Both of those personal media outings came three years into my sobriety, at a time when I was very much enjoying life, both personal and professional. It’s worth pointing out that sobriety was never something I kept hidden or under wraps. From the start, I was quite comfortable with the fact that I had sought help for my drinking, much the same way a diabetic seeks insulin. Having said that, I had been careful, with much of my writing, not to fall into the confessional, first-person genre of journalism, which has been gradually diluted by unchecked ego since the days of Hunter S. Thompson and the everyday descriptive poetry of Robert Lowell.

  When fashion journalists spend a night on the streets, so they can write about how it would feel for them to be homeless (minus their haute couture), then you know conscience-driven journalism has taken a wrong turn somewhere. I feel the need to justify myself, then, in the face of a confessional journalism culture, where shock and awe sometimes replace probing and insight as the determining factors. We also live in an age where rehab has gone very public, with ‘personalities’ frequently stepping in and out of treatment, from where their tell-all stories are offered to the highest bidder. Behavioural crucifixion and salvation sell—just tune into Jonathan Ross any Friday night if you’re looking for proof.

  This was never intended as an academic endeavour, more a teasing out of some of the issues behind Ireland’s drinking culture through my own personal insights. My reasons for laying down my thoughts were as much determined by the society I live in as by any lingering desire or need to make public my personal self or to mark a break with my past. My security with sobriety seemed to climax at a time when Ireland’s problematic drinking patterns had been soaring unchecked for almost a decade. It’s not that I felt a duty, but I felt qualified to examine some of the reasons for our problem drinking and how it is being addressed. That, coupled with the fact I was also just plain curious.

  That’s not to say I don’t have reservations about exercising what I hope will be interpreted as emotional honesty. I’m conscious of family and friends reading aspects of this publication and not being wholly comfortable with my revelations. I’m conscious of my son picking this up as a teenager and having to deal with my shortcomings as a father during my drinking and how that may subsequently impact on him emotionally. Perhaps the guilt and shame of abusing alcohol never quite leave you, and there’s an inclination to keep those feelings hidden or suppressed. It’s something I have thought long and hard about—the dangers of offloading my story at any cost and of being labelled as the guy who pillaged his problem past for a book. I’m wary, then, of becoming a one-issue candidate who hurts the feelings of others needlessly and recklessly on the road to redemption. These are all issues I have taken into account before embarking on this examination.

  Yet there is, in my view, far too much secrecy around the subjects of alcoholism and problem drinking in Ireland of 2009. There are too many stories that remain untold and far too much anxiety and stress and trouble that problem drinkers endure and cannot relay because society is the way it is. The irony is that in my personal life I’m careful not to allow my sobriety to become a defining characteristic. And yet, here I am writing about it! In the end, I guess it came down to the fact that I’m not the person I describe in the first two chapters any more, and haven’t been for a very long time. Hopefully those who know me will recognise that. And the old cliché abounds: if retelling my struggle with alcohol offers insight to someone, one person even, currently in the depths of that struggle, then the work will have been worthwhile.

  I have tried also to collate some of the reports, studies and statistics available in relation to Ireland’s current relationship with alcohol. While the information is constantly changing and being updated, some key facts remain. Firstly, that overall alcohol consumption grew faster in Ireland than anywhere else in Europe between 1996 and 2003. The rise of the off-licence, accounting for just 19 per cent of sales in 1991 and more than 35 per cent in 2006, is another noticeable trend, changing our drinking patterns to a more insular, domestic practice. The change in our drinking patterns has also been fuelled by the rise in consumption of wine, which grew fourfold between 1985 and 2003. Other statistics and analysis, such as the rise in alcohol-related illness, spikes in binge-drinking levels among the young and the rise in alcohol-related suicide, are contained in later chapters.

  During the course of the research for this book, I received an email from Dr Stanton Peele, one of the world’s foremost addiction thinkers. He told me he had read what I had written in the Irish Times. His probing reply took me a little by surprise. ‘I’m glad you’ve stopped drinking, if that makes you happy,’ he said, ‘but rather than being a revelation to the Irish—that they drink too much—this is of one piece with the Irish binge-purge sensibility, and actually reinforces their underlying alcohol pathology.
You probably don’t want to read my book, where I say, “If you see the choice as being one between abstinence and excess, you’ve already lost the battle.”’

  As time has gone on, I’ve come to see sobriety less as a clinical or psychological choice and more as a lifestyle one, like cutting out meat or sweet foods. That way, I manage to sidestep all the alcoholic definition debates and all the abstinence versus moderation dilemmas that stalk the mind of many a problem drinker in Ireland.

  I may have already lost the battle, as Dr Peele suggests, but I’m enjoying the struggle nevertheless.

  His point fails, though, to fully grasp the Irish cultural and historical experience. Colonisation, hardship, religious repression, emotional need, greed and economic giddiness are all contributory factors to the Irish experience and relationship with alcohol. For many in this country, drinking excessively helps numb that experience, and has done so for generations. To paraphrase Homer Simpson, in Ireland, alcohol is often the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems.

  My personal opinion is that it is only when we have a sincere national discourse around some of the issues behind our problem drinking that a new relationship with alcohol can begin to assert itself. It won’t, in my view, come about by importing a café culture, or by limiting or tailoring the current drinking culture by exclusively legislative means or information campaigns. It will come about only by a change of mindset, by a deeper understanding of why the Irish drink the way they do, and what can be done to tackle some of the underlying reasons for our behaviour with alcohol.

  A UK-based employment specialist I met on holidays was telling me about his experience working with high-flying executives. He couldn’t get his head around the fact that often when he put forward Irish clients for interview with Irish employers, they would meet in a bar and, in his words, ‘have five or six Guinness to break the ice’. Some of the jobs they were going for had salaries of upwards of £100,000 per annum, and going on the lash before signing on the dotted line was the culturally done thing. It didn’t happen with other nationalities, he noted. It’s this accepted embedded relationship between the Irish and alcohol that is the core of our societal issues with drink, and I hope that some of that reveals itself in this narrative.

  I recently read about Chris Matthews—a liberal political pundit on MSNBC, and a proud Irish-American. On the MSNBC morning show, responding to a joke by Mika Brzezinski about his drinking at a prominent Irish social event, Matthews declared, ‘Despite the ethnic stereotype, I haven’t had a drink since 1994.’ The problem is, though: this is the Irish cultural stereotype. As Dr Peele notes, ‘Addiction thinker George Vaillant found that Irish-Americans in Boston were seven times as likely to become alcoholics as Italian, Greek and Jewish Americans—at the same time as they were more likely to abstain.’

  The observation appears to be backed up here by a recent Department of Health study, which found that Ireland is the European country with the lowest daily drinking rate and the highest binge-drinking rate. Only two percent of Irish men drink daily, while nearly half binge weekly. This is the virtual reverse of drinking patterns by Italians, for instance. Abstinence and excess are familiar bedfellows in Ireland’s relationship with alcohol. We opt for cut out before cut down. How many of us, for instance, have woken up after a heavy night to vow, ‘Never again’?

  There also exists an often tense relationship between sobriety and socialising in Ireland. One of my preferred bars in Cork, and also one of the oldest in the city centre, serves sandwiches throughout the day. I tend to pop in regularly, enjoy sitting at the bar chatting with staff or local regulars. But after 7 p.m., the bar stops serving coffee and tea. Why is that? Is it saying that the night is the sole preserve of the drinking classes? Is it saying that my money is okay during the day, when alcohol sales are off peak, but come the dark, I’m persona non grata? It’s a small point, but a point to be made nonetheless. This mindset needs to change so that the distinction between day and night is blurred, and public houses (those that are left) can concern themselves less with excess and more with enjoyment, experience and tangible social engagement. Last St Patrick’s Day in Dublin, I organised to meet two friends who don’t drink or take drugs any more. We were determined to mark the national day of Irishness, and set ourselves the task of getting a cup of coffee post-9 p.m. in the city centre. Bewleys duly obliged, but given the night that was in it, they closed at 9.30 p.m. Business was quiet. Two of us went looking for a cup of coffee in Temple Bar. Practically every coffee machine had been turned off since 6 p.m. Bar workers shook their heads, looking at us as if we were from a different planet. In many ways we were.

  Staying sober and having what might be termed ‘a fun night out’ are often mutually exclusive for Irish people. A sober night is to be endured rather than enjoyed. In company, you’re a lift home, a finder of bags and coats, a shoulder to cry on. With the advent of late-night bars, the art of conversation has been further muted, overdubbed by slurs and sound systems. Irish publicans have confused overbearingly loud music with atmosphere. I’m beginning to sound like your parents. I know. And that’s the other thing with this sobriety lark—it’s hard not to over-moralise, testing to remain non-judgmental. It’s difficult to offer insight without sounding like you’re casting a shadow from the moral high ground. To comment without patronising. Over the coming pages, I have attempted to lay down a recollection of my own journey from adolescent experimentation to problem drinking and beyond. Following from that there is an engagement with the wider issues of alcohol abuse and Irish society. Drinkers, like those I encountered in London and Tipperary, can be at once deluded and insightful, warm and revolting. It was my intention to portray that world in an authentic manner, interfering as little as possible in its telling.

  Along the way countless persons have helped me with publication and I owe them a huge debt of gratitude. Fergal Tobin at Gill & Macmillan was the first publisher to pick up the phone and broach the subject of turning my thoughts into a book. Others such as John Leahy, Dr Chris Luke, the Night Ravens in Copenhagen, Mannix Berry and Catriona Molineaux, Shane Malone, Sophie Johnston, Professor Joe Barry, Faith O’Grady and many more, all gave freely of their time and I am hugely thankful to them for their contributions and observations. As for those who told me their own stories, the people I met in London and Tipperary, in the Aislinn Centre in Kilkenny or casually along the way, I remain full of admiration for their honesty and daily struggle. Others who allowed their stories and insight to weave through the narrative—Mary Coughlan, Mark O’Halloran, Niall Toibin, John Leahy, Frances Black and Des Bishop—added enormously to the variety of the text and were very giving of their time and patience.

  Even after spending a year examining the subject of alcohol abuse and consulting widely on the topic, I’m still unclear as to why I ended up a ‘problem drinker’. I’m not sure the pathology matters, though, as much as the personal approach to dealing with the issue. Sometimes, we can get too caught up in the ‘why’ rather than dealing with the ‘what now’. I’m conscious, too, that I have taken a particular editorial line when talking about the relationship between the Irish and alcohol. Many of those interviewed had acute difficulties with alcohol. Of course not everyone who drinks runs into problems. Moderate drinking is a fine means of social interaction. I’d be at it myself if I was able and there are plenty in Ireland, from individual publicans to large brewing companies, able to articulate the merits of such socialising. For this publication, though, my interest lay more in the point where moderate drinking becomes problem drinking, both on a personal and societal level, and what the consequences of that change are and how it can be dealt with.

  In my personal life I realise I have been incredibly fortunate. My struggles have given me a different understanding of life in Ireland—something of an outsider’s lens, perhaps. I only hope I have done the subject justice and offered some added understanding of what, or who, drives us to drink the way we do.

  Brian O’Connel
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  7 April 2009

  Chapter 1

  Taken to the Sup

  The first time I got drunk was 1991. I know this because after a naggin of Bacardi, I thought I was a fighter pilot who sang U2’s hit single ‘One’ (released in November that year) while simultaneously and indiscriminately bombarding the urban sprawl below—in this case Stephen Corcoran’s first-floor landing—with the remnants of a snack box from Enzo’s takeaway. Analyse that.

  I remember little else, except a feeling of otherworldliness, of having pushed through the fur coats at the back of my mind and entered a new exciting universe, where the drink and I shared the throne. Growing up in a town like Ennis, where one local swimming pool had signs stating, ‘No Heavy Petting in the Deep End’ and graffiti such as ‘Heavy Metle, Loud and Poud’, there wasn’t much else to do besides getting out of it. In fact, practically every conversation from the age of about 14 onwards revolved around drink or, more to the point, how to get it. You were judged by how many pints you could hold, where you could get served, how sick you got and what the consequences were. You talked about the easiest off-licence to get served in, what bars and nightclubs accepted fake ids, and what were the best spirits to mix together. There were buses organised to nightclubs in neighbouring towns, which turned into rampaging drink tours of places like Gort and Lahinch. There were teenage discos where drink was hidden in urinals hours beforehand. There were cans in the cinema, bottles at dawn on scouting weekends. There was even a healthy bootleg market, where alcohol and cigarettes which were stolen from local grocers were sold at knockdown rates. Everything, and I mean everything, revolved around drink.

  Looking back, my drinking career was more Pádraig Harrington than Tiger Woods, a steady rise as opposed to a dramatic and alarming early introduction. In fact, most Irish teenagers would have had the same type of experiences as I had. There was no real self-destruct button in evidence at that point, and my adolescent boozing would have been considered routine by Irish standards. Faking ID cards, siphoning a bit of spirits from the drinks cabinet at home or slowly building up my tolerance levels from two pints of Carling to three—it was all pretty normal stuff.