I admitted that I was drinking too much and that it was a problem and gave a commitment to returning to the treatment service the following week. In the room with a family counsellor, I began discussing my life and how out of control it had become. By this stage, I had recently been evicted from another house I was renting, again after only six weeks, for non-payment of rent. I found this out one night, when I had persuaded a girl to come back for coffee and perhaps some third-leg boogey, only to realise all the locks had been changed. Having tried and failed to scale the outside wall, she quickly left in a cab and I settled into the coal shed. George Clooney eat your heart out. When I was sober and had some clarity on the situation, I was aware that alcohol had wreaked havoc on my life and my headspace. I knew that whatever difficulties life would have thrown up in the normal course of things were compounded 100 per cent by my overdependence on the booze.
But, as the definition goes, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I kept waiting for my life to get going, and it never really did.
I remembered a boat trip to Croatia the previous summer. It was an organised trip and I was the only single person on a boat of couples for a week. Every night, when the captain went to bed, I would help myself to the tap of beer in the main galley. It got to the point where I even poured drinks for the rest of the passengers. But something happened on that trip. I became more withdrawn, more depressed. I was prone to crying in the middle of the day on my own. Looking back, I probably had something of a mini-breakdown half way between Split and Dubrovnik. I called my mother and told her I wanted out, that the life I was living had to give. I cried and apologised.
She organised for me to take a call from my local GP in Ennis, who told me to call to a doctor soon as I got home. I did and arrived in her surgery in a mess. She said she felt really sorry for me, gave me sleeping medication and advised me to call Alcoholics Anonymous. I called, arranged to go to a meeting, and expected to be cured by the time it finished. Some of it I could relate to—the emotional toll it takes, the madness and mayhem, the skewed logic. But much of it I just couldn’t sit through—the acquired dialogue, the nostalgia and so on. I left and never went back. Six months of drinking later I was in a prefab on the grounds of St Finbarr’s hospital and it was only then that I finally began owning up to my problems. I discussed my living situation and the type of friends I was hanging around with. I talked about the panic attacks and the morbid thoughts. The counsellors listened compassionately, and following two or three meetings decided that outpatient treatment wasn’t going to work for me. I was still moving in social circles where drink was freely available and partying was ongoing. Although I had managed to stay off the drink for over a week, it was only a matter of time before I would fall back into it again, they suggested. They asked would I commit to rehab for a month. To paraphrase the poet, I said, ‘Yes, Yes, Yes.’
Mid-November 2004, and a friend dropped me off at Tabor Lodge Treatment Centre in West Cork, with a bag full of books and a head full of belligerence. To be honest, I was glad of the time out, of fresh sheets, three square meals a day and the chance to start over. My life had become one long hangover, punctuated by bouts of self-pity and short flashes of self-realisation. In Tabor Lodge, I wasn’t quite as bad as other cases; some had been to jail, others begged on the streets, while one guy snatched handbags from old ladies. Yet all of them had been at my stage on the way up, and I could relate to enough of it to know I needed to be there. The thing with alcohol or any other dependence is that it is a progressive disease. I had an insight into the future, brother, and it was murky.
I met others in treatment I could relate to and we all sort of undertook this voyage of honesty together. It was a relief to be away from the mayhem of my life for a prolonged spell. A relief, too, to get something of a second chance with family and friends. For four weeks we had daily counselling sessions, where we accounted for our actions and looked at ways to prevent them recurring. I struggled with the word ‘alcoholic’ and began to question the tenets of Alcoholic Anonymous. We were shown a video of a priest on the ‘Late Late Show’ years earlier who took a broad definition—if drinking causes you problems, then you are an alcoholic. Christ, I thought, no one in Ireland was safe! Addiction treatment was searingly honest, and offered a multifaceted approach to understanding how my life had gotten so out of control. Yet I wasn’t quite willing to buy into the one-size-fits-all formula necessary for addiction treatment. I found compulsory AA meetings tough going and couldn’t relate to the adopted diction and repetitive slogans. How many of these stories were borrowed from each other, I wondered? We’re a nostalgic race at the best of times; throw sentimentality into the mix and it felt, to me at least, like romantic war stories. That’s a personal opinion, said in the knowledge that AA is the only thing that works for so many people.
What rehab gave me, most of all, was structure and space. There was daily meditation, and long walks in the surrounding country lanes, several hundred yards from the wooded centre. Three weeks in, several of us were taken to Kinsale for an AA meeting and that was as much contact with the outside world as we had up to that point. I could take phone calls, but noticeably, few of my ‘friends’ picked up the phone.
It wasn’t without its lighter moments either—I established strong friendships, some of which endure to the present day. Several compulsive gamblers were part of the group, and often, serving dinner, I asked if their preference was for ‘Beef or Salmon’, a well-known racehorse at the time. Games of football at break time pitted the alcoholics against the drug addicts, while the first Friday night in the centre we were allowed watch a movie as a way of dealing with the weekend edginess. The choice, ironically enough, was The Shawshank Redemption. The most popular book doing the rounds in the centre, after the AA manual, was Howard Mark’s Mr Nice, his account of his years as one of Europe’s largest soft-drug dealers. Not exactly ideal reading for a bunch of addicts trying to turn their lives around, is it?
The toughest parts were when family members came to the centre to speak frankly about how my drinking had affected their lives. Or when I had to read out among the group what family and friends had to say about my drinking. There was nowhere to hide in those moments, which, of course, is exactly the point. As a group we confronted each other daily, probing our fellow addicts, and comparing and contrasting their stories with our own. It was a genuinely cathartic experience and a nurturing time spent bonding with people from outside my social and moral circle. In many ways it reaffirmed for me the universality of human experience.
For some people, the fact that I was attempting to give up drink meant the natural end of our friendship—if you could call it that. I remember one friend, who took me aside just as I was committing to the 28-day residential treatment programme. We met in a Cork bar at evening time, and he’d come up specially from the countryside to deliver his verdict. His take on it was that once I went in for treatment, it would always be a negative mark on my medical records and go against me in future life. He urged me to reconsider. All I needed was regular work, he said. A nine-to-five and everything would be fine. Needless to say, we haven’t stayed in touch. There were others who drifted away naturally, and in many cases, I only realised afterwards the extent to which certain friendships were based around alcohol and how little I had in common with those people once I left that life behind. The natural break with many of these associations came on entering rehab and there were very few of those friendships I look back on as being of value.
Studies show that only a small percentage of addicts, some say one third, others say it’s as low as 15 per cent, come out of treatment and remain sober or clean. Of the group of 18 people I was in treatment with, incorporating overeaters, gamblers, drug addicts and alcoholics, I know that some have committed suicide, others are in jail, and perhaps four or five maximum have remained on the straight and narrow.
I was one of the lucky ones. While I have every respect for Alcoholi
cs Anonymous, I determined to stay sober largely of my own accord, and somehow it worked. I didn’t have the staying power for weekly meetings or group sharing. I felt I had given up alcohol to leave that world and its experiences behind. There was also a religious aspect to the movement, mainly Catholic, which I didn’t share, and while the association points out they are appealing to a God of ‘your own understanding’, I felt it was kind of like Sinn Féin saying they were not part of the IRA. But within AA are some incredible people, with amazing insights. Few other social groupings or organisations have the ability, through dialogue, to effect such change in their members, and I would encourage anyone in need to at least give it a try. After a month of treatment, two days before Christmas in 2004, I left Tabor Lodge. It was surreal re-engaging with Christmas decorations, packed streets and the reality of having to forage for myself again.
The key to my sustained sobriety was that I got lucky very quickly. Work opportunities came along within weeks of rehab ending, which enabled me to draw a clear link between sobriety and professional fulfilment. It also gave me the space to start afresh with friends and family and allowed me the breathing space to put things right in my personal life. A clear distinction was emerging between life with alcohol and life without. I could pay the rent. My son stayed over. I got a cat and went back playing golf. Simple things. The other key was that I managed to rent a nice house, a little outside the town centre, and a friend who had a similar outlook on life at the time rented a room. So we both became buffers for each other’s sobriety, and for a year it was all staying in watching the television with Ballygowan and biscuits. That time away from socialising, though, was needed. I had to get to know myself again without the luxury of alcohol to access my emotions. Somehow, it worked out. My advice to anyone who feels addiction is taking over his or her life is to abandon ego and seek help. There is an alternative life available; it just takes a little while to find it, that’s all.
When I look back now, my introduction to alcohol came through the usual routes—the odd bottle of Harp here or sips of Bacardi there. I’m not quite sure why my formative experiences led to issues in later life. All I know is that by the time my late twenties came around I’d come to rely more and more on alcohol as a means of social and personal interaction. The counsellors in rehab pointed to the fact that being the first in my family to pursue academia may have been a trigger. Others felt that becoming a father in my early twenties also had something to do with it, while my genetic makeup also played its part. I’m not sure any of those explanations are in any way valid. For me, I drank because I could, and more often than not because it made me feel better about myself. Simple as that, really. It was when it stopped making me feel better that things began to unravel. On reflection, my addiction was not particularly severe. I had no ongoing health problems, no criminal convictions, and at its height, I still had a few people around who were willing to invest their time in me. I didn’t need a drink first thing in the morning and could go days, perhaps even a week, without it.
Some months back, I called a respected French journalist in Paris, asking for some contacts for a later chapter. I mentioned I was writing a book following experiences I wrote about in the Irish Times article. ‘Oh yeah, I read that article—I didn’t think you were an alcoholic, though,’ she said.
So am I an alcoholic, then? Well, it depends on who’s asking. The term ‘alcoholic’ has much more severe connotations in Ireland than in the United States, say. To be called an alcoholic in Ireland, a person has to be at the very rock bottom, at such a low point that society is no longer willing to tolerate their presence at the national party. So, in that context, in the extreme definition of the term, I probably don’t fit the definition. But if an alcoholic is someone for whom drinking causes problems, then hands up, that’s me. I’m more inclined towards the phrase ‘problem drinker’—it has less social stigma and more practical connotations. And anyway, what’s definition got to do with it?
As time has gone on and I’ve begun to fit into a life without alcohol, I’m less concerned with how many drinks I had at the height of my drinking. I’m less concerned with what grade of seriousness my problem was at. I’m less concerned with what people may think and with labelling.
What I know is this. When I left rehab, two days before Christmas in 2004, I had €60 in my pocket. I went from there to a mattress on the floor of a friend’s spare room with two broken springs shooting up through the middle. I wouldn’t have gotten so much as a stamp from the bank. My media career was in the doldrums. I had to re-engage with fatherhood responsibly. I was left with a handful of friends. In a social setting I had little to offer—my confidence was shot, I was still paranoid and had yet to feel wholly comfortable walking down the street.
Now, five years on, I’m a homeowner, with a wonderful career, a great family, a beautiful son, a partner, I enjoy conversation and I like me. I actually like me. So again, was I an alcoholic? I honestly don’t know. But what I do know is that none of the things in my life right now were appearing on the horizon while I was falling out of late-night bars several nights a week. I know also that living a sober life is not that big a deal. It’s a readjustment, sure, but it’s very doable readjustment if you get a break or two along the way. Having said that, living in Ireland it’s easy to be carried along by the feeling that everyone else seemed to be drinking the same amount as I was and didn’t have an issue. If you allow those thoughts to play themselves out, it can be dangerous. Even now when I say to people I don’t drink because it was a problem, most people want to know how much I used to drink. They want to be able to quantify it in numerical terms. We have an obsession with quantity in Ireland when it comes to alcohol—how many pints? Was it every day? Did you spend much money? What was the most you ever drank?
But that line of questioning misses the point. It’s the psychological debris that goes along with heavy drinking that wreaks most havoc on the individual. It’s the feeling of worthlessness, the compromised morality, the loss of self and identity. Those are the things inside the mind of every problem drinker to a greater or lesser extent. I was never one to hide bottles under toilets or behind cupboards, because I didn’t have to. I lived in a society that encourages you to be upfront about your excessive drinking.
In fact, there are probably thousands of people living the same sort of life I led and functioning away, seemingly content. For me, though, it got to a point where alcohol laid siege to my morality and sense of self-worth. I realised that at a young age, leaving plenty time to start afresh without too much irreparable damage to confront. Others are not so lucky.
Much of the time, I had an inner voice trying to convince me I was too young to have a drink problem. Sometimes I wondered if it wasn’t all in my head. Perhaps if I got a nice girlfriend, or change of location, it would all be fine. When dependence becomes an issue, you start making all sorts of side deals with your fading conscience: maybe you can just cut down. Stick to the weekends or cut out spirits and just drink at home. An alcoholic is someone on a bridge with a brown paper bag and you start trying to convince yourself you’re not nearly as bad as those people. But there will always be extremes in any illness, and it’s up to the individual which stage you want to identify with.
When my career began to take off once again, as a journalist I was very conscious of speaking publicly about my views on alcohol and my personal experience. There are too many ‘one-person’ journalists in the world without me adding to the genre, I felt. But as time went on I felt compelled to make my views known, to not hide behind the fact that I drank and now don’t. Although I have been careful not to let my sobriety become the dominant theme in my life, and even writing this, I’m conscious that I could become easily stereotyped as the ex-drinker willing to exploit his experience for a story. I also don’t want to define myself simply by virtue of the fact that I don’t drink.
So while I’m wary of adding to the canon of rehab stories churned out on an almost weekly basis,
the interaction between sobriety and society in twenty-first-century Ireland remains a hush-hush affair. If you’re sober in Ireland, the general message is to keep it to yourself and not spoil things for the rest of society. My reasons for putting my story down are simple: for years, I advanced my dependence on alcohol in a very public forum, whether it was staggering out of a bar mid-afternoon or turning up at a media launch the worse for wear. And now I’m supposed to keep schtum because I don’t do any of that any more. Because now I don’t fit the stereotype, and perhaps that makes people uncomfortable.
It’s been five years since I spat out the hooch and turned my back on the world of libation. Five years, and not so much as a Bailey’s cheesecake has passed my lips. While the first few months were undoubtedly tough going, now I don’t have time to think about going out and getting hammered. I have seen and witnessed a different Ireland. It takes a bit of getting used to, and some situations I’ll never be wholly comfortable with.
What I’ve found is that late-night socialising in Ireland is not exactly a spectator sport. When I do go out, it gets to a point, usually after 11 p.m. and before 12 p.m., when I make my excuses and leave. I don’t like the smell of bars at closing time. I don’t like spilled beer or soggy beer mats. I don’t like elbows and staggering, pub talk and cover bands. All the things I would have loved about bars—the escapism, the camaraderie and the craic—I can’t quite relate to anymore. If anything it’s a little self-isolating. And I am first to admit, especially for the first year of my sobriety, I sometimes tended to shut myself off from the world. It’s a hell of a lot easier than remaining socially active. Part of that is because I feel comfortable in my own skin now and enjoy the more mundane aspects of life.
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