There were plenty of weekend mornings when I woke with vomit strewn sheets, or had to struggle to recall whose mouth my tongue had found itself resting in the previous night. Lucky girl. Ennis was well known for people getting into bars from about the age of 15 onwards—the general attitude was that it was better for youngsters to be in the pubs than in fields somewhere. Ennis was also known as a strong drinking town which prided itself on the number of pubs per capita and the co-dependency between traditional music, craic and pints.
Farmers on market day filled the bars of the Market, revellers from all over the county filled the narrow streets all weekend, and tourists wandered about bemused by the free-for-all that passed for acceptable nightlife.
It seems, too, on one level, the generally accepting societal response to underage drinking in the area has changed little since the early nineties. Some months back, one local newspaper carried the headline ‘Kids on the Booze’, after a 17-year-old in court named three outlets in the town where alcohol was freely available. Local publican Declan Brandon, whose premises was not one of those named, and who has tried to promote music in his venue in the town for decades, was quoted as saying the issue of underage drinking was a very hard one to police, and compounded by the fact that ‘every house is like a pub or off-licence at this stage. There is far too much alcohol around the place. There should be far more restrictions on the availability of alcohol outside pubs.’ He’s right, of course, as the crushed-can-littered fields and estates around Ennis can testify.
The local nightclub was The Queens, and the main ambition of any discerning Ennis youth from early adolescence was to conjure ways to get past the bouncers and enter what seemed like hallowed ground. ids were passed down from older brothers, or, with the advent of basic home computers, some were made and sold. Some tried their luck booking into the hotel adjacent for the night or holding the hand of a far older girl on the way in. Once inside, it was all about kissing girls and drinking pints. Later, thanks mainly to Tom Cruise, cocktails entered the fray. Drinking away from bars, or bush drinking, as it was known, was as popular when you were of legal age as it was through adolescence and beyond. The choice of location was either the rail tracks adjacent to the town, or the girls’ convent, which had the added comfort of bus shelters. Years later, fellow Ennis native Mark O’Halloran told me that much of the inspiration for his film Garage, in which youths gather on rail tracks to drink cans, was taken from growing up in Ennis. Invariably three or four cans would be downed before hitting the bars between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m.—some of the group would have been in their thirties with good regular incomes and perhaps married with kids, but they were still drawn to the outdoor boozing. It was both a non-conformist and, more to the point, a financial thing. After a quick pit stop in one of the town’s many bars, the general form was to try to blag your way into one of the town’s nightclubs, where stealing drink became part and parcel of the night out. This was done by nonchalantly joining a group with a table of drink piled high, and passing a full pint backwards to an accomplice waiting yards away who could then quickly make a getaway. On the dance floor, ‘Cotton Eye Joe’, ‘Dirty Dancing’ and ‘Come on Eileen’ provided the backing tracks.
From time to time a new Garda drive in the town would see a number of bars raided and fines imposed, but generally it never lasted too long. Drugs had yet to make their way wholesale into rural communities, and the general attitude seemed to be that this sort of mass alcohol abuse was part of the fabric for any market town. On the rare occasions you went out for dinner, you booked a table early—say seven or half past—so that you’d have it over with by 9 p.m., when the real socialising could start.
It’s not that there was much else to do—no arthouse cinema, theatre, art galleries, few if any gyms, restaurants were still of the beef-or-salmon variety, and dinner parties were something you wore a tuxedo for. Welcome to 1980s Ireland, then.
It was sort of like that community in ‘The Wicker Man’—everyone knows something is not right, but all are complicit and reliant upon continuing the wrongs through the next generation in order to keep the social fabric intact. In other words, once the problem was contained within the community it was accepted and fertilised. The bars and nightclubs seemed happy enough to be cultivating their future customers young, while parents saw it as a rite of passage for early adolescents to have a pint.
Many youngsters were taken to the bar by their parents first, at 15 or 16, and given their first pint. For the majority this heralded the arrival of adulthood.
This societal acceptance existed, probably, in every other town in Ireland too, and would eventually lead Ireland to have one of the highest rates of binge-drinking in Europe and an alarming level of suicide among under-25s. It didn’t take a genius to spot the warning signs—every social function, wedding, birthday, christening, birth, death and celebration in Ireland revolved around the pub and pub life, and still does to a certain extent. For young adults, especially growing up in a small close-knit community like Ennis, the majority of formative experiences were filtered through an alcoholic gauze. I know it was that way for me. I look back at debs nights where I was lying on the ground getting sick, on post-match underage celebrations where trainers and players held up the bar. Alcohol soaked the fabric of pretty much every aspect of life in a town like Ennis and very few people seemed concerned about doing anything about it.
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With secondary school out of the way, I set my sights on university and headed for University College Cork, where I enrolled in Arts, the academic equivalent of hedging your bets. I first got accommodation in digs, with an elderly lady near the university. Initially college life was a rollercoaster of free drink, beat-the-clock promotions, hazy afternoons and missed morning lectures. My mind was adjusting to the new academic light, trapped between small-town mentality and medium-city freedom. I quickly got into the swing of things, bought a pair of dungarees, dyed my hair red and settled in for an extended party. Oasis and Blur were waging a Britpop war and Pulp were heralding common people. David Gray was playing introspective ditties to a few hundred students in bars on Barrack Street and sounding more despondent each time, while Sir Henry’s nightclub was witnessing the peak of the Ecstasy-fuelled dance scene. I bought my first bottle of wine, ate in my first restaurant without my parents present, and became acquainted with Sophocles and shots, often at the same time.
The digs came to an abrupt end when I fell asleep across the kindly lady’s bathroom door while trying to get sick one night. This had the effect of denying her access to her morning denture routine. I told my mother the food was terrible and the room cold, and she called the lady to say I wouldn’t be coming back. The kindly lady responded by telling my mother I had the beginnings of a serious drinking problem. We all laughed, and I settled into a newly built townhouse behind an off-licence and within a stone’s throw of the student nightclub quarter.
Drink of choice in those days was bottles of lager or flagons of cider at home (mostly Linden Village or Old Somerset or other such vinegars with questionable cider complexes), while pints and shots were opted for towards the end of the night. Drink was cheap—this was still the time of legally reduced prices and promotions in bars where shots were free or pints half price. I always had a student job, so whatever spare cash I earned was invested in socialising. There was an inevitable tension involved in engaging with this more upfront and adult student life. I began learning to cook (pork chops on a bed of instant rice) and buying a few bottles of Carling to accompany the cooking—sometimes the Carling doubled up as a sauté. I thought it was posh. In retrospect it was more of a means of masking inadequacy.
Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday were the student nights, while the temptation to blow the week’s money on a Sunday night was ever present. I flirted with both socialism and Republicanism, combining nothing for everyone with dying for Ireland. Neither cause lasted very long. Drugs were mainly limited to hash and weed and because money was tight and supp
ly was expensive, the quantities involved were small.
There was never a moment when I thought drinking three or four nights a week was cause for concern. In many ways it wasn’t. Society didn’t frown upon it, parents never questioned it and friends were all doing the same, if not more. Not much room for a reality check there, then. The first summer after college was spent in Cape Cod, as was the subsequent one, and in both cases drinking took on a daily regularity. I got work in an old hippie store called Yellow Orange, on Main Street in Falmouth, which sold Beatles T-shirts and Indian jewellery. I spent two summers behind the till, getting an education in the 1960s counterculture three decades after the event, and got to know an assortment of drifters who used the shop as a hangout. Included was Chris, an ex-fisherman, by this stage a heroin addict who had HIV/AIDS and sold the shop his monthly supply of uppers and downers in order to feed his habit. Others, such as Happy, a dope addict, or Christine, an amateur hairdresser, would stop by and buy the pills for $2 a go, asking for ‘blue’ or ‘pink’ toilet paper, depending on which ones they wanted. Steve, the owner, who missed out on Woodstock because all his staff took the day off, was glad of the company behind the counter and let me have the run of the place. I had thoughts of staying on and taking over the shop, perhaps writing the Great American Novel or picking up work on a fishing trawler out of Woods Hole in the off season. Steve introduced me to Eddie, an Irish-American mobster whose father had been shot dead by the Mafia in Boston on his tenth birthday. Eddie was on the Cape getting away from a life of hustling, and sold grass to keep things ticking over. I bought it in enough quantities to make sure I didn’t have to pay for my own use, while Eddie would lecture me from time to time—‘Hey Bryannn, you make sure you call your mudder in Oireland every week, ya hear?’
Another guy who came into the shop was Brian, an Irish-American who never worked a day in his life, living off his wife’s income and eating in the local Chinese restaurant every day. He carried a photograph in his wallet of his dead father lying in his coffin, which always struck me as very odd.
Last I heard, Chris died, Happy was destitute, having moved from grass to crack, Christine was placed in a psychiatric hospital for murdering her daughter, and Brian still eats in the same Chinese restaurant every day. The shop is now a laundry store, with Steve working administration for a power-tripping college graduate, having failed to make astute investments down through the years. His only regret is not closing the shop for Woodstock.
Those summers were seen as time off from college, and so anything went and was excused. Bottles of Michelob, shots of tequila, bags of grass and insect bites were the extent to which I engaged with wider American culture outside Falmouth. For my nineteenth birthday, I decided to pierce my nose, DIY style. Several bottles of beer later and I applied an ice pack to the right nostril while smearing the whole area in Preparation H, which numbed the skin. A safety pin culled from behind a couch did the piercing, and from then on my right nostril was the proud owner of a gold stud, which grew up to be a silver ring when college started back. Presumably, by doing this I was rejecting conformity, although if I had my time back, I’d much rather have a scar-free nostril than rail against the ‘system’.
My social thinking was all skewed, confirmed when I had to come back early from the States to repeat one of my subjects, which, appropriately enough, was sociology. Without having handed in any course work, I had gotten a respectable 23 per cent in my end-of-year exams. Not quite Noam Chomsky, but not a bad return for having missed every Friday morning seminar since the academic year began. I repeated and got the exam and was back in time to take my place on the annual rag week booze cruise. My only other memories of that rag week were dressing up as a student nurse for the Rags Ball and being thrown out of the nightclub for doing lines of speed in the female toilets.
Of my three years as an undergraduate I only have selective memories. I’m slightly wary of writers (James N. Frey take a bow) who can recall whole episodes involving their past drunken or drugged selves. If you indulged enough, then you shouldn’t be able to remember! My attitude to drugs was that I could take or leave them. Invariably, of course, I took them, mostly cannabis and the occasional brew of magic mushrooms, later on ecstasy, cocaine, MDMA, acid and speed. There were some fellow students who entered Sir Henry’s nightclub in first year only to re-emerge years later, 3 stone lighter and a lot more paranoid. I exposed myself to the dance scene in limited bursts, maybe every second Sunday night or on bank holiday weekends. I still had a fear of what drugs could do, and had seen several Ennis natives whose lives were destroyed young enough for me to realise I needed to creep up slowly on this particular animal.
There were exceptions, of course, including a heavy weekend in Amsterdam with a trainee doctor who was always up for a night out. We were staying with a Canadian friend, and had partied through the night in anticipation of the weekend’s delights in the Dutch hedonistic oasis—Amsterdamaged, as we liked to call it. The three days there are now distilled in my mind to about four or five freeze frames. On day one we sourced herbal Ecstasy tablets and some cocaine from a local street chemist. The cocaine had the same effect as an anaesthetic from a dentist, albeit with a splitting headache thrown in for good measure. We got it into our heads that the herbal pills were having no effect so doubled up on dosage. The rest, as they say, is a bit of a blur. I remember ending up at a squat party in a former embassy somewhere and walking past neo-Nazis training their alsatian to attack members of the public. ‘Come to Amsterdam and suppress the memories for a lifetime’ should be the Dutch Tourist Board hook.
Other memories flash back every now and then—getting hit by a car outside Sir Henry’s nightclub while on Ecstasy, limping off before the Guards arrived and spending the remainder of the night rolling around the Mardyke Cricket Pitch. Generally I felt socially awkward and found getting drunk or stoned a way to sidestep those feelings. I never would have seen it that way; at the time I was just doing whatever everyone else was.
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Knuckling down in the second year of my studies, I finished the year with a respectable result, enough to suggest I had a shot at a decent degree. I was living with a girl at the time, a childhood sweetheart from the end of our schooldays in Ennis, and the stability of that relationship had an impact in limiting multiple benders in any given week. I had vague notions of becoming a teacher, so it was important to make some bit of an impression with second year’s grades in order to secure the postgraduate course. In the main, I felt academically slight. Perhaps it came from being surrounded by a new intellectual discourse. Before attending university, my reading was mainly limited to Stephen King novels and whatever was demanded on the Leaving Cert curriculum. Hopkins appealed, so too Kavanagh, and on a personal level, I could relate to Othello’s emotional frailty. I didn’t know much about New Romanticism, right and left political argument, postcolonial theory or Bob Dylan. I probably couldn’t even have told you what the main difference between Communism and capitalism was. I struggled with the apostrophe (still do!), and given that I was the first in my family to go down the academic road, I found it difficult to relay my experiences when home. Dislocated, both physically and psychologically, would be how best to describe it. Ours wasn’t a bookish house in any event, which isn’t a criticism, just a statement of fact. I was often struck by the reality that my dad worked hard in those early years to be able to keep the family finances on track and send me to college. Yet, the more time I spent in university, the further away from him in outlook and experience I got. We get on well now, but it took time, and in a way, and I guess this is the same for many parents of his generation, he was enabling the distance between us by virtue of the fact he was doing an honourable thing and financing my studies. Zadie Smith put it best when writing on her relationship with her father, and the feeling of alienation brought about by furthering her studies—‘It was university wot dunnit,’ she remarked.
At the time I could also be desperately socially awk
ward (what Irish person isn’t at some level?). Walking into lecture theatres late was a major ordeal, and so too was walking past groups of colleagues in the bar and having to speak in small tutorial groups. It came from a feeling of inadequacy which would later be suppressed by the faux camaraderie of the bar scene. Back then, though, I was unsure and idealistic. Later in this book, Des Bishop talks about the generations of shame and guilt Irish people carry around with them, of how much of a wounded society we Irish are. Perhaps there was some of that, an inner feeling that here I was in university, debating the constructs of Beowulf or Banville’s Book of Evidence, when only a few generations earlier my ancestors struggled for their very existence. Both my parents’ families were from rural areas of west Clare, and would have had to contend with eviction, famine, war, and religious extremism. Perhaps, and not to get too Jungian on you here, that collective energy needed venting at some point, or was passed through the generations needing an outlet. Or maybe I was just unlucky—maybe I had emotional issues I didn’t fully address and they hid like dormant fleas, waiting for the right personal habit to come along which they could attach themselves to and achieve liberty of sorts. Whatever the reasons, my drinking during those years changed and became more and more a badge of who I was and how I thought.
——
In final year I managed to rediscover quite a bit of self-discipline and from January that year onwards, I socialised very little. Course work was going well, complemented by two drama courses, which allowed for performance-based modules. Studying history sparked an interest in Irish land agitation, specifically the west Clare region where my ancestors had farmed. For my final year undergraduate thesis I focused on the Vandeleur Estate, part of the Kilrush Union, where a series of evictions occurred in the mid-nineteenth century. Halfway through, a history professor took me aside, enquiring whether or not I had thought of a career in academia. Of course I hadn’t but said it would be something that appealed. And why wouldn’t it, with the chance to spend a few more years milling about campus, living the student life? It became clear during the final year that I was headed for a good result, and still with vague notions of teaching at the end of it. I fell in with a good group, where academic competition was high, and we all strove for the elusive first-class degree, egging each other on. After the exams I headed to Edinburgh for a summer, where my drinking returned to pre-final-year levels, although this time there was an edge to it not present in previous years. Whiskey, and more specifically Canadian Club, became my drink of choice; I often downed shot after shot between rounds or on my own when no one else was looking. It enabled more erratic behaviour and blackouts became more and more frequent. I worked in a Mexican restaurant, usually in the mornings and evenings. In the afternoon, in fact every afternoon, I went to the Green Tree Bar, and found camaraderie there among the regulars at the counter, which appealed to me throughout my drinking life. Every day, the regulars participated in the Channel 4 game show ‘Countdown’, with military-style concentration—whoever got the conundrum was assured free drinks for the rest of the evening. I got it once, and it was a great day indeed. I longed to return to America and one night/early morning came home from an all-day whiskey session, packed my bags and informed my room-mates, including my girlfriend at the time, that I was heading for Boston and would see them all at Christmas in Ennis.
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