They looked pained and pleasured and, if I’m honest, part of me would have loved to have pulled my barstool close, swapped my tea for a crisp, cold pint of Carlsberg and joined in the craic. I began to visualise that moment of holy transition from the remnants of one pint to a freshly poured one. The feeling as the beer began to settle into an empty stomach, having taken time to get comfortable in its surroundings. The writer Eugene O’Brien has a line in the play Eden, when one of the characters is having the first pint of the morning after a heavy night and remarks that the new beer is meeting the old beer and both are getting on just fine. I could see that moment in the faces of the regulars, as that first-mouthful grimace turned to a grin, and the shakes began to recede.
The barmaid was like Nurse Ratched, carefully measuring out the medicine (mostly large bottles of stout) with the inmates (regulars) chatting amicably through the dispensing.
The inmates in this case were all bad teeth and tense expressions, unfurling crumpled notes, checking watches and grabbing the barmaid’s eye in a sort of wink-and-elbow language of transaction. Few of them asked for a drink by name, their liquid leanings known intimately to the staff behind the dispensary.
By 2.17 p.m., one of the regulars, now on his sixth pint of the day, was close to not being offered any more.
‘Have you anything to tell me?’ he asked the bar worker.
‘No, have you?’ came the reply, as he was given his last pint.
He had been in the bar since 10.50 a.m. that morning and was beginning to get a little what we might call rowdy. Perhaps sensing he had become centre of attention, he made his first statement of the day:
‘Do you remember back the years, there was a show, “Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em”?’
‘I do,’ I said.
‘Well by Christ she had a right one when she had me!’
I couldn’t argue with him, really.
While I was sitting there wondering whether I should introduce myself or remain in the background observing, one guy walked over and asked how the book was going. My cover was blown (aside from the fake glasses and nose, the tape recorder and frantic note-taking probably gave the game away).
Without prompting, ‘John’ began to tell me his life story, beginning with the blunt fact that he had tried to take his own life three times over the past few years. The last time was in Dungarvan, he said, when he had to be fished out of the water. While he was telling me his story, his mobile rang every few minutes—his 18-year-old daughter trying to get him home. Five years earlier his relationship with his daughter’s mother had broken up. Had he ever tried to knock the drink on the head, I asked.
‘I managed to stay off the drink for about nine weeks after I had residential treatment; that’s as long as I ever lasted.’
A fortnight earlier, John had again tried to stay off the booze, but broke out and was now on his fourth day of solid drinking. He had a rising list of medical conditions, including a swollen heart, and his daughter was partly calling to ensure he took his medication and didn’t miss an appointment with a specialist later in the week. He had missed the previous two appointments. ‘The doctor told me it’s not entirely my fault,’ he said, ‘it’s more the country I live in. I know everything my daughter is saying is right but I can’t hear her because of the drink. Once I get a taste for it, that’s it.’
He worked here and there wherever he could, but arthritis prevented him from working a regular week. He sounded resigned to his fate. ‘Treatment wouldn’t work for me, I tried it,’ he said.
When I asked him how many drinks per day he got through, he said he wasn’t able to answer. ‘I might work a few hours and help out around the place here and then I could drink for another few hours. My daughter is on the phone saying I will have to go back to treatment, but I can’t relate to the people in there. A lot of the men are violent with the drink but not me. Looking back on my life, drink just got the better of me.’
The fact that ‘John’ was willing to speak openly about his addiction and his attempts to tackle it confirmed something I have noticed over the past few years—that drinkers were becoming more open about alcohol-associated illnesses. The bar worker and wife of the owner confirmed as much, when I brought up the subject with her. ‘I don’t think there is as much of a stigma anymore. I know the lads in during the day will still slag about it. Some of them might have been in psychiatric wards but will see that more for depression rather than drink. I think the stigma thing is going.’
Getting treatment is one thing, though; being able to remain sober after treatment is the tricky part. ‘It’s extremely hard if they don’t have supports,’ said the bar worker, ‘unless a wife or someone is getting onto you about it, it is a real battle. If you have a job and stuff then fine, you may be able to make it. The difference is that you need to have another life outside of the pub. For guys who don’t have another outlet, what are you going to do? Are you going to say is it worth my while to sit here? I imagine if I was in their place I would be thinking, so what will I do, sit at home seven nights a week?’
The question of how these regulars finance their drinking lifestyle is beginning to resonate more, now that the economic boom has been left behind. But where there’s a wino, there’s a way. ‘One of the guys coming into us is drinking some amount at the moment and I’ve been thinking, where is he getting the money?’ said the bar worker. ‘Someone told me he is selling cigarettes on the black market. A lot of people are on the dole and they work cash in hand. This worked very well before the recession and they’d get a few jobs from a builder and get very well paid. So if they work two days [a] week, it’d be enough. Lately one of the guys worked a bank holiday Monday and he said to me, “I never worked a Monday in my life, not to mention a bank holiday!” That will tell you how bad it’s gone. But that’s how they fund it, they’re milking a system and these people are all on rent allowance and so on. Those that have kids, I can’t say I ever see the kids suffer financially. I don’t know how they fund things like that—Christmas comes and is sorted, and so are communions and confirmations. I don’t know whether they borrow money but you don’t see them skint very often. Lately a bit, perhaps, but I hadn’t seen it for years.’
John’s approach stayed with me. As an ex-drinker you’re constantly having to stop yourself assuming the moral high ground and judging. You forget sometimes how ridiculous the plight of the problem drinker is and the lack of control and awareness a serial drinker has. Sometimes I drive past bars where daytime drinkers are congregated and want to open the window and call them all fucking losers. Fuck them and the added strain on the health system. Fuck them and the chips on their shoulders. Fuck them and their stories of being passed over for jobs or screwed by ex-wives. Fuck them and their farts, their stale breath, their yellow teeth. Fuck them.
I get angry, not because of them (although you’d hardly know it!), but because I wasted so much of my own existence, of my life, thinking there was some benefit from sitting on a high stool for large chunks of the day and theorising. You forget the hold drink can have over someone, how utterly powerless an addict can be over the forces of alcohol.
You forget about the reality you construct for yourself, about the skewed thinking and the insane list of priorities. Even monetary values are broken down into units—€50 was 10 pints, or the bones of a session. Anything less and you needed a Plan B, a backup.
I got money from everywhere, from overdrafts to credit cards, from term loans to bounced cheques. Without a bank account thanks to credit problems, I would cash cheques wherever I could, from local shops to pawn merchants. Christmas and birthday presents often found their way into pawn shops—anything to keep the session going.
It’s an insane way of living, a hand-to-glass-to-mouth existence, and you sometimes forget about the logistics of daytime drinking and what a full-time occupation it is.
By 3.30 p.m. only one of the regulars was left, nodding off (his first sleep in 24 hours), in the corner of the bar.
Tickets for the annual Christmas Lotto were flying all afternoon as the majority of the early-morning regulars made their way home for a few hours’ rest. Some headed to an off-licence for a naggin to help them through the rest of the day. The drinker’s smell, a mix of tobacco and old jumpers, left the bar for the first time.
I got a chance to talk with the owner who has been working here for 27 years. The crackdown on drink-driving has significantly impacted on the older locals moving from village to village and having a few drinks on their way, he told me. The younger people are now only into ‘quick’ ones, and are often only seen when he has a function in the bar. ‘They’re into the shots and so on, although I have a more settled crowd here. You see it going on at parties and that and they tend to get oblivious to what’s going on around them. It’s mostly eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds and their drink of choice has become spirits. When I was younger, and it’s not all that long ago, you’d like a pint and rarely touched spirits.’
I like the owner—he has his own health problems, which he has tackled head on with an overhaul of his diet and a positive outlook. Anecdotally, locals had told me of the manner in which he looks after his problem drinkers—of him going the extra mile to make sure they paid their rent or didn’t drink every penny they had. I noticed myself that he was careful not to give some of the regulars spirits and made sure they didn’t do anything foolish and get too out of hand. There was healthy respect among the regulars towards him and I got the feeling it went both ways, and not in a superficial, ‘I’ll take every penny you have and pretend to be your friend’ kind of way.
I was interested to get his take on the difference between the problem drinker and the regular one.
‘That’s a hard question to answer. Every pub has a few regulars. You would have the lad in here, as you saw, on a Monday all day and he is probably a problem drinker. My definition of a problem would be when they don’t go to work and things like that.
‘Some of the lads might be on the dole and waiting for the cheque on Thursday so they can be in here.
‘A lot of the lads are separated and they have problems. In terms of the money they might have nixers on the side and things like that. I wouldn’t have too many problem drinkers, I would say, I have a few heavy drinkers and you’d ask yourself are they alcoholics too? They probably are. I notice, too, that girls are drinking much more now. They would now go for drinks on the top shelf and things like that.’
I couldn’t help feeling, though, that the owner was complicit in the destructive lives of his daytime drinkers. He recognised some of them had problems, sure, but wasn’t he fuelling the issues in their lives by serving them alcohol every day? Wasn’t there a conflict there?
‘I find that hard,’ he said, ‘but I suppose I am a kind of a counsellor here as well. That’s especially true in a small village, where you know too much of what’s . . . going on. Part of my job is listening a lot and you have to try and help. Of course, I am aware of what is happening and it can be a conflict sometimes, but that’s the nature of the job.’
When asked why he thinks some people drink more than others, the owner said a lot of it, in his opinion, is down to loneliness. Although the nature of conversation in the pubs is changing, he says, and the community aspect of the bar is being eroded.
‘The culture of drinking has changed an awful lot [in] the last few years. The pub is still the focal point of many communities and for many individuals—you still have the banter and the craic, just not as much, and you don’t get the groups of people coming in. That’s what I like about the pubs, you know what’s going on, both good and bad, and it’s all discussed in the pub. A lot of the time it goes in one ear and out the other—you can’t be listening to everything!’
The owner said he looked forward to the day when he could bring his own son or daughter into the bar for the first drink—already, he said, they would have a glass at Christmas. ‘Eighteen or nineteen is the right age for a drink in a bar; I’m not into the idea of kids drinking in a pub at fourteen, fifteen or sixteen.’
One thing he says he has noticed in the past decade is that many of his regulars will now drink at home, something that was unheard of in previous times.
‘Growing up, we never had drink in the house. I only see it here in that there is a bottle bank right across the road and I see people dumping stuff there. It has increased steadily in recent years and probably accelerated when the smoking ban came in. That kick-started it. For anyone who smoked it was a big culture shock. I know one person in particular who hasn’t come into a pub since. He’s not local here, but will only go into a pub if there is an occasion, such as an anniversary or that, now.’
We continued to chat about changing traditions. The owner pointed to the fact that a neighbouring village had 20 bars at one point and is left with four now.
‘I think the pub will always be there in rural Ireland,’ he said, ‘but the numbers are declining and I can see a lot more closing. Pubs in the real country areas on their own find it very hard. The Guards are closing in on them and locals have to go to a place where they can get a lift home or villages where they can walk.’
Not one to stand still, the bar has started to do food this year in an effort to broaden out their daytime trade. ‘You have to move on with the times, definitely, and food really is a must if you’re going to keep the people, even for a funeral or anything like that. You feel that if you don’t [there’s] a danger that the local trade could be lost because they’ll go somewhere else. In Ireland our culture is very much pub orientated and I enjoy it. Having said that, you don’t get the big functions like you used to get years ago. Think about christenings, for instance, and only a small minority now come in and have a function.’
The demographic of the daytime drinkers in the bar was very much bachelor and Irish, with few women and fewer still foreign nationals. I remarked to the owner that it seemed out of step with the changing culture outside, of the new multiethnic Ireland which has emerged. He then told me a story that happened a few months earlier.
‘I had an experience with a guy who had a room rented upstairs. He was training to be a doctor and was from eastern Europe. He worked as a stable lad for a trainer over the road. A very nice fellow, and he told me his story and showed me pictures of his wife and his child. He was still far off becoming qualified as a doctor but he ran short of money and he wanted to spend three years here to make enough money to build his house and finish college. So he was on his second year here and he went home for Christmas and his wife was to come back with him and the child. He was at home for a month when he came back. I think his wife wouldn’t come back—she wanted him to come home but he knew another year or two would see him through. So he had money saved up and he started drinking a lot, bottles of vodka and so on. Maybe he was depressed at being up there without his family.
He was a very nice chap, a young lad, maybe twenty-seven or twenty-eight. You wouldn’t get foreigners in here that often. Him and a friend would come in and play pool and so on and have a few beers. But they started drinking heavy upstairs and you’d see him drinking bottles and carrying empty ones over to the bottle bank. It was beer and spirits mostly they drank. The only big spirit-drinkers we would have were after funerals or something, when fellas would have a few shots. But this lad just got into a routine of drinking and was buying it locally in shopping centres. He went on for months, and one day, he just fell down up there and died. He actually died there. He drank himself to death. We put a few quid together to get his body home.’
I found the story quite shocking. When I first visited the bar, weeks earlier, one of the regulars had died the weekend before and there was a post-wake of sorts happening. The man who died had cancer, I think, and other health complications. Every week the bar owner would take him out of hospital and bring him down to the bar for a drink. He had gone from being a solid drinker to barely being able to hold two pints towards the end. It was my first introduction to the bar—locals talkin
g with fond memories of this man who drank with them, who worried with them and who, by his presence, allowed them to continue their lives beside the counter. And now he was dead and no one was making a link between the unhealthy lifestyle of the daytime drinker and his premature death.
To be honest, I found the whole scene quite depressing. Not that it is in any way unique—bars all over Ireland have similar scenarios, and I guess at least with the bar I visited there was a conscience at work behind the taps.
That evening the owner’s wife invited me for dinner. We sat down for a chat in the living room of their large home, on a gated site across the road from the bar. Try as I could to suppress the thoughts, I was struck by the probable dichotomy between the landlord’s home and that of some of his customers. Many of them, I imagined, slept in weeks-old sheets, tin-can-boiled eggs the extent of their culinary exploits. In contrast, the owner’s home was well kept, family orientated, spacious and comfy. Not that it was his fault that he had done all right over the years. He doesn’t have the problem. But the thought struck me that drink provided him with a nice family home and environment, whereas for many of his customers, it broke up what families and homes they had.
His wife told me she had worked in an office until her husband’s illness forced her to take a career break. Now she does the morning shift in the bar, dispensing the morning dosage to sickly patients. She brought an outsider’s eye to the daytime trade and her preconceived ideas on the type of people who drink during the day had changed dramatically since taking over the morning shift.
‘I worked in a bar years ago, before I ever got married, but only started working back behind the counter a while ago. It’s only now I’m getting used to the daytime crowd. Before, I would . . . only have worked when we were really busy and it was nighttime and you’re hardly talking to people, just throwing out the drink to customers. I used to hate the idea of daytime work. But now that I have been in there I got to know the people and actually I enjoy it. I really enjoy their company. Some of them are very witty and I guess I take a different view of it now.’
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