Wasted

by Brian O'Connell

  It’s very hard to know, also, with that rehab culture, about how genuine it is. I would say most people are looking for something, and addiction plays a huge role in their lives and it’s not for me to judge. I still think in this country the shame and stigma attached to addiction stop people from asking for help. The first step in addiction is awareness and then asking for help, saying, ‘Where can I go to sort this out?

  I have a huge passion about addiction and addiction in Ireland, to such an extent that I set up a foundation called the RISE foundation, which stands for ‘recovery in a safe environment’. Our first project is for family members. In my experience of talking openly about it in an interview or on the radio, I would be inundated with people from families looking for help. So that is why I decided to set up the foundation.

  The person in addiction is in a complete haze, and not really present. So the question is, how do you get them to really want to change? In a way, you can educate the family members about how to handle someone in their family who has addiction. For me, that’s the first step.

  I wouldn’t have considered myself an alcoholic. I do know now, but at the time I wouldn’t. My drinking wasn’t spirits. So my idea of an alcoholic, which would be most people’s idea of an alcoholic, was someone sitting in the pub all day or the wino out on the street, or someone who had to have a drink first thing in the morning. That wasn’t the way it was for me. My drinking would start with wine about six in the evening and I could have maybe a bottle and a half of wine a night. At the weekend I might go out and drink pints. To me, though, that wasn’t alcoholism—I mightn’t even have a bottle and a half every night. It might be four nights a week.

  My attitude would have been, I’m sitting at home and not hurting anybody or not out in a pub making a show of myself. Whereas in reality, I would have been falling into bed most nights and the effect that would have had on my life was huge. For a start, I would have had a hangover next morning and be grumpy and narky and preoccupied. I wasn’t present. I wasn’t present to my family. I was getting through the day but dying for six o’ clock when I was making the dinner and having my glass of wine. I’d be really looking forward to it and sometimes it could start earlier.

  Nobody had any idea. Everyone was shocked when I said I needed to go for help. My husband knew something wasn’t quite right as he wasn’t a drinker. I do believe there are different stages of alcoholism and I might have been at the middle stage or even before that. People might find that hard to take because if they acknowledge you have a problem, then they have to look at their own drinking and say, ‘What does that make me?!’

  Or you would get the type of response—‘Jaysus, she was no worse than any of the rest of us!’

  What changed my life is that I read an article by a journalist. I think it was in the Irish Times, some time back in the 1980s. Her pattern was like me except she was into the gin and tonics and then would go and do a day’s work. She would come home and have a bottle of wine with dinner and then a little more gin and tonic and go to bed.

  She couldn’t understand why she couldn’t stop and eventually went for help. That was a bit like me. I tried to stop and couldn’t and I couldn’t understand that. After two weeks of being off it, I nearly lost my mind. I started to sneak it, and these were all things that made me rethink.

  When I read the article there was a number at the end, so I thought I’d go and have a chat with them and get assessed. I was completely convinced they would say to me, ‘You just need to cut down on your drink.’ But then I went to the counsellor, I sat down and was really honest. I would have had blackouts and so on at that time. She said to me, really casually and non-judgmental, ‘There is no doubt in my mind that you are an alcoholic and you need to come here.’

  It was an outpatient treatment centre and it was for three nights a week, so it was a huge eye-opener for me. When I stopped drinking the career took off. But I was always dabbling in prescription tablets, so really there would be times I was worse than others but I never thought it was a problem. Because it was prescription drugs the doctor gave them to me, so it was all right. It was only in later years, when I had to give up the tablets also, that I realised you could swap over addictions. So I ended up in a treatment centre later on and it was more for the tablets. I would actually say, for me, my primary addiction was prescription tablets because it was harder for me to come off them. It was easy for me to come off the drink. And I still get a longing for the tablets.

  They were better than alcohol in many ways because you could function and still have a conversation with people and they wouldn’t know. But the side effects destroy your life and the consequences are horrendous. They were a lot worse for me than alcohol and the ups and downs can make you very suicidal.

  I wouldn’t have had a career if I was drinking. I really do feel my career took off the minute I stopped drinking. Before I went for treatment I had been asked to join a band and I had to go and tell them, ‘I have to go for this treatment.’ They said they would wait for me and when I came off treatment I joined the band and it went from there. The hardest thing I ever had to do was to walk on stage without a drink.

  There is this Irish thing that we can drink and it brings out the creative side within. I don’t agree with that, personally. I’m not saying it doesn’t work for some people. But I’d love to see those people without drink and see what comes out if they did the right amount of work on themselves and did all the spiritual and soul stuff.

  For me I hadn’t done much stage work beforehand, and I had great support because it was with my family and there was a great support. It was scary walking on stage, though, as it would be for anybody. I knew I wanted to do it so that’s what kept my legs walking on the stage. The fact that I could stop drinking gave me great courage—if I could do that I could do anything.

  I think it’s scary in this country as we are drowned in addiction. I’m petrified as to the consequences of what is going on, really. That is why I really want to try and do something to look at the shame and stigma attached to addiction. I get up on stage every night and tell my story. I don’t have any shame around the fact I’m in recovery; it’s not a big deal for me, it’s just a disease, and I’m working through it.

  So I feel more people need to talk about it, not about the fact that they go into rehab—they need to talk about what it was like and what it felt like. And yes, I will speak openly about it if I feel it can help one person in this country.

  If I am successful in setting up a treatment centre it will be an education treatment centre for families about addiction. This is so that anybody who wants to learn about addiction can come and learn that this is what addiction is. It’d about telling people, there is a format that can work and this is how you need to look at it.

  The research I have done shows that the cost to the taxpayer of one child in untreated addiction is £800,000 in one addict’s lifetime, whether it is alcohol or drugs. So if the government could prevent one child going down that road they will save themselves that money. If they gave someone £1 million to set up a treatment centre they’re going to save on things like A&E. I mean fifty-five per cent of people who go into A&E over a weekend is alcohol- or addiction-related.

  If you look at Ireland and the way the whole thought process is around alcohol and the minimising of it as a problem. I was doing a conference in Kerry with lots of government representatives and addiction counsellors, and all they were talking about was they were going to come down heavy on drugs. I actually said, hang on a second, addiction is not just drugs, it’s alcohol, it’s things like prescription tablets and gambling. Yet all you hear is, ‘We’re going to go down heavy on drug dealers.’

  For me, socially, being sober, you are a little more isolated and I do feel isolated. I don’t tend to hang around pubs that long. But I have a great life. I have a lovely husband who doesn’t drink. I don’t think it would work if he was in the pub every night. We go out for meals, we go walking. We go to plays a
nd do all the things that people in other countries do! If you go to New York or San Francisco that’s what people do. They don’t really go to pubs to hang out. I love going away. I’ve been in San Francisco and a lot of it is around food and dinner. You might invite people over and they’d have wine, but they might have a bottle of wine and they’d all have a half glass each and some of them mightn’t even finish the glass. I’d be amazed at that! They’d be having sips of water and some of them would be more interested in the water. They go to restaurants or go out to [a] theatre. It’s just sad for me there’s not that many people in Ireland who do that. And that’s the reality. So when everyone goes to the pub I get bored and last maybe three quarters of an hour.

  Weddings I don’t mind because I dance but I wouldn’t stay late; I go and have the meal and have a chat but there’s a point where it might get a little late and I go. I always have a room in the hotel just in case we need to escape!

  I think any country that has been colonised, where your land and home has been taken off you, that type of trauma carries through generations. I went back to college to become an addiction counsellor and one of my assignments was trauma and addiction in post-conflict Northern Ireland. Everybody in the North has been touched by the conflict, as we know, and traumatised by it. What happens in that situation is that the trauma is carried onto another generation, even through the peace process, and manifests itself in a rise in addiction and problem drinkers. This generation is now carrying that trauma. I do feel there is this thing in Ireland where you don’t show your emotions and feelings. Secrecy is a huge thing in this country, which was a defence, in that you didn’t want anybody to know your business. People are afraid to show their emotions in this country.

  If you have twelve in a group receiving treatment, the studies show only about three will make it. So it’s scary, and I think, if society was different, that statistics might be higher. It’s really hard for a young man to come out of treatment and all his mates are getting pissed every night. This is my experience and I work in the Rutland Centre in Dublin every weekend and do a lot of work around relapse prevention. Everything is lovely for the five weeks people are in treatment and they have great support and a good environment. When they go back into their own environment, in many cases they’re on their own. And it’s not easy, but that’s the country we live in.

  Chapter 4

  Past Pioneers

  It’s hard to know what came first, the Irish or the drink. Many travellers in Ireland from the 1600s onwards made comment about the revelry of the drunken Irish. Reference to alcohol, or ‘aqua vitae’ and ‘usquebaugh’ as it was called, do not occur in Irish sources until the fourteenth century, although, as Elizabeth Malcolm in her fine study Ireland Sober Ireland Free has pointed out, the art of distilling is thought to have been invented as far back as the twelfth century. ‘Fermented liquors such as ale and mead had, however, long been staple drinks among Celtic peoples,’ Malcolm notes, while adding, ‘It is interesting to note that the name of the Celtic goddess, Medhb, literally means, “she who intoxicates”—a clear indication of the significance of drink in Celtic culture.’ Or how about this eleventh-century poem to St Bridget: ‘I would like to have a great lake of beer for Christ the King/I’d like to be watching the heavenly family drinking it down through all eternity.’ It’s Irish Christianity, Jim, but not as we know it.

  In his introduction to Inventing Ireland, Declan Kiberd begins with the probe ‘If God invented whiskey to prevent the Irish from ruling the world, then who invented Ireland?’ It’s a rhetorical rise, sure, but there’s a kernel of national truth in there somewhere. By the mid-sixteenth century whiskey had become such a problem in Ireland that the English government felt it necessary to introduce legislative controls. In a preamble to the required legislation, there was notice of how ‘Aqua Vitae, a drink nothing profitable to be daily drunken and used, is now universally throughout the realm of Ireland made’. Stricter decrees were used to limit the making of whiskey in Ireland to peers, gentlemen and borough freemen. By 1571, the manufacture of whiskey was banned in Munster. In 1584 the Lord Deputy received a note for the reform of Ireland. One of the main suggestions was that the previous ‘statute for the making of aqua vitae be put in execution, which sets the Irish mad and breeds many mischiefs’. As with today’s legislative approach, the series of acts and decrees had little effect on drinking levels.

  When we get to the first half of the seventeenth century, excessive drinking and drunkenness were prevalent in most parts of Ireland. And it wasn’t just the poorer classes who were at it—it seems most social classes in Ireland had a fondness for the drop. Here is Richard Head’s observation of the Irish gentry: ‘If you, on a visit to them, do not drink freely then they think they have not made you welcome, so that a man know not how to take a leave until he is unable to stir a foot.’

  Writing in the early twentieth century, historian Michael McCarthy noted that the association between alcohol and the Irish had become embedded. His acute observations tell a familiar picture of the social ubiquity of alcohol in Irish society. ‘Amongst Irish Catholics, drink is the synonym for hospitality. It stands alone and is not associated with food. Every festive meeting, every social call, every business transaction, must be wet, as they say, with a drink. The man that does not stand a drink is considered a mean man; the man who gives drink freely in his own home and pays for it for others in public houses is a decent fellow. There is a kind of veneration for the man who has spent a fortune or ruined a career by drink; and people expatiate in the great things he might have done were it not for drink.’

  The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century story of Irish drinking is one of attempted zero tolerance, beginning with the morally flawed figure of Father Theobald Mathew (1790–1856) and the attempt to form temperance societies in recognition of the growing social problem with alcohol. The Corkonian intoxication with the figure of Father Mathew, founder of the Temperance movement, is well established in both popular song and sentiment Leeside, most famously in the refrain The smell from Patrick’s Bridge is wicked/How do Father Mathew stick it?/Here’s up them all says the boys of Fairhill.

  The Father Mathew statue, known locally as ‘de statue’, has taken on symbolic significance, and is to Cork what Clery’s clock is to Dublin—a place where relationships begin and end and friendships are born and broken. The strong connection with the ‘Apostle of Temperance’ is interesting when viewed alongside nineteenth-century drinking patterns, said to rival our current twenty-first-century ones. Our love of drinking didn’t begin today or yesterday, in other words. The Temperance and Pioneer movements were side effects of the guilt and shame associated with Irish drinking. As we’ll see in later chapters, that guilt still exists among the Irish problem drinkers in London. It exists, too, in daytime drinkers in rural bars in Tipperary and in those who serve them and facilitate their lifestyles. It exists among adolescents and schoolchildren when they talk about alcohol and their relationship to it. More than likely, I carry some of it around myself. But it’s not just guilt that drives the Irish relationship with alcohol, which is one part puritanical to two parts party. As the great addiction writer George Valliant has observed, ‘It is consistent with Irish culture to see the use of alcohol in terms of black or white, good or evil, drunkenness or complete abstinence.’ In other words, when it comes to Irish drinking, for many it’s a case of all or nothing.

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  The story of Fr Mathew encapsulates well this extreme Irish attitude to alcohol. Born in Thomastown Castle, Co. Tipperary, on 10 October 1790, Theobald Mathew felt a lifelong affinity with the poor and distressed and this was evident from an early age. Influenced by local priest Fr Denis O’Donnell, Mathew entered the seminary in Maynooth in 1807, at the age of 17. Not long after, he reportedly threw a party in his room in honour of some kindred spirit, and to save himself the embarrassment of expulsion, the following morning he left the seminary. The Capuchins took a chance on him, and he entered
the order in 1810, quickly establishing a name for himself as an engaging and magnetic public speaker.

  From a friary at Blackamoor Lane in Cork he captured the affections of the poor and the confidence of the rich, with his treatment of the penitents in the confessional drawing particular attention to his sympathetic nature. As in contemporary society, alcohol abuse was rampant in early-nineteenth-century Ireland. While accounts differ, Mathew himself was known to take a drop, and many argue it was this personal experience that gave him an insight into the alcoholic mindset. I visited the present-day Capuchin order in Cork, where Fr Dermot Lynch lent me his own insights. ‘I think the affinity with him by the people came from his own life for the ten years while he was involved in the Temperance movement, he became a Pioneer. Before that he was a moderate drinker. I think his greatness came from the fact that he helped turn the tide of public opinion. It was a very popular thing to drink at the time, yet eventually over three million people took the pledge. The Temperance movement was only the beginning of a large-scale social movement in Ireland, yet it was an important first step.’

  There is little doubt that Fr Mathew did a lot of good, particularly for the poor of Cork. Yet he remains a controversial figure, and examining the purported facts surrounding his life means discarding much of the historical hyperbole.

  Like all great leaders, he had his demons and was known to be ego-driven, arrogant and prone to serious lapses of judgment. Throughout his life he had financial difficulties and was at odds with the hierarchy of the church. Perhaps there is something in that—in the ambiguous attitude between alcohol and organised religion in Ireland—which Fr Mathew challenged. Says Professor John A. Murphy: ‘I think it’s fair to say he was at an oblique angle to conventional Catholic thinking in that he was a teetotalling freelance cleric. I don’t imagine he was subject to any great discipline by his own order, but then again one of the great themes in the nineteenth century is the tension between diocesan and regular clergy, and he fit into that.’