Authors: Brian O'Connell
They say there was seven hundred years of oppression by the Brits but the real oppression was done by our own. I do feel that there is a collective unconscious and I do feel the
country hurts.
There was abuse in my family, abuse in my parents’ family, and I do believe I have called time on it now because I have confronted all my demons.
It’s always better to talk it out. So many people are in denial in Ireland. I know personally people who have tried to stop coroners’ reports. There are an awful lot of
deaths that are drink-related and not reported. Lot of heart attacks, brain injuries, and [a] lot of it is alcohol abuse. I don’t think the government can do anything about Ireland’s
way of drinking. It’s a cultural thing. I know when you’re seventeen, and there’s drinking in your family and you’re emotionally fragile. I don’t think anybody can do
anything about it. I don’t think banning drink or putting up the price does anything. Kids have to find their own way. Addiction, as far as I’m concerned, is a huge personal pain people
have and what they do to bury pain is to use, food, alcohol, and drugs. Anything that removes you from reality and become overused and keeps you from thinking about your life.
My kids know and I’ve talked to them about it and my fears. I suppose I’m very excited about Cian. I was sober for three years before he was born and he is twelve now
and he’s going into secondary school in September. To be quite honest, I’m looking forward to it as much as he is, because I’m going to be there physically, mentally and
emotionally all the way this time. I have worried about my kids feeling lonely and abandoned. I drank on that for years and felt guilty about that and remained fucked up about it. A fella said to
me one night in the Rutland Centre in an aftercare group, having been there for two years—‘Get off the fucking cross, Mary.’ His point was, whatever I had done was over with and I
had to get on with now.
I swear to Jesus I have a life beyond my wildest dreams and I don’t go to
AA
. I discovered scuba diving when I was forty-eight. Horse-riding.
There’s a new man in my life. I have grandchildren. Looking forward to building a house, looking at a site. All that stuff.
The first time I went on holidays I remember it was a little difficult and the last holiday I had with my husband was particularly difficult because I knew we were going to split
up. I’ll never forget him drinking wine on our holidays and that was really difficult. I work really hard at things now. But it’s only in the last four or five years that I have been
able to reap the rewards.
The at-home drinking in the last few years has been huge. I know people who have built bars in their houses. And they are now staying home more and they say it’s because of
the recession and so on. I think it’s because people are hurting. There is going to be a huge thing of drinking at home, and women have always drank at home anyway.
I remember growing up, even, there were two women who were absolutely stunning on our road. We were never let into their houses, and I found out when I was in my twenties that it
was because they were alcoholics. Lovely-looking women and very well kept, and I had no idea. I remember when I was living in Howth and I had a few women friends and we used to drink and the
question did come up an odd time, ‘Do you think we’re fucking alcoholics?’ We did drink a lot, very rare an evening would go by and you didn’t have three pints. And where
that wasn’t going to rip anyone apart, it was the beginning of it. And you get progressively worse. I remember not sleeping one night because of the jitters and getting into the car and
driving in to the early house. So that’s where it leads you.
With the
AA
meetings I had planned to do everything I was told to do, so ninety meetings in ninety days. If you had told me to jump off a house I would have
done it. Some days I went to two meetings and really felt the need for them. It was just for the connection, and I loved the aftercare group. Anything to do with pain and grit and real
soul-searching I loved. I’m not knocking
AA
. If this is what people need to get over their addiction then that’s fine. I just didn’t want to stay sober, I
wanted to find out why I drank in the first place and find out what would keep me away from it for the rest of my life without saying this bullshit of ‘One day at a time and I’m Mary
and I’m an alcoholic and so on’. I didn’t believe that. I had a public forum, though, and I did engage with that and it was cathartic for me and I did it. I did go to
AA
for a long, long time at lunch and in the evenings. I still go because of the social element. A lot of the women I know in New Zealand I have met through
AA
.
There’s a huge difference going to
AA
in other countries. In Sydney, the
AA
there is like counselling sessions; it’s not just surface
stuff. But it’s easier not to drink there too. I think the scene in Ireland now is really, really bad drinking, more so than ever. I saw a girl one night, when I was coming up through Temple
Bar, and she was on a bollard and she had a skirt on up her arse and every bastard that passed her out on the street was having a feel off her. She was puking her guts out. I went over and asked
her if she was okay and she told me to fuck off. It was so depressing. I was doing a show in the Olympia and had to walk back through Temple Bar six nights a week. Monday night not so bad, Tuesday
night okay too. Thursday, Friday, Saturday—give me a fucking break. Vomit everywhere and that was in the height of the Celtic Tiger in 2002.
I know a lot of artists talk about needing drink after shows. I remember once finding it hard to sleep and sharing it at an
AA
meeting in Bray. The reply
was ‘No one ever died from lack of sleep!’ And it’s true. I never worried about the effect not drinking would have on my creativity. The only person who worried about it was my
ex-husband.
He felt I wouldn’t be any craic any more. But I’m the best craic now; I have just finished a tour and got an email back from the band saying they really enjoyed every
minute of it.
They were all having a drink and I was buying them a drink after the show. They could have one drink before the gig and none on stage and they are my rules. They all know now, as
well, the difference between a drunken musician and a sober one is a huge benefit.
I don’t buy the drunk artist thing. Shane MacGowan’s thing is the most depressing and disgusting scene. I hate all the people around him for doing what they’re
doing and I know most of them. Shane MacGowan and myself and Nick Cave used to do it to the best of our ability in dressing rooms after gigs. Huge bags of cocaine and huge bottles of drink and
pills. Shane is the only one carrying on that lifestyle. People have died in his company, some very young. I was singing in the church at one funeral and in the middle of the thing in came Shane
and slithered to the back of the church. I have no time for anybody like that. I have compassion but I have no time for the people who he hangs around with. I did a huge tour with the Pogues and
sang every night Kirsty McColl couldn’t do. I did the most frightening gig of my life at Brixton Academy and all those people jumping up and down completely out of their minds. It was fucking
horrible. I sang with him at the Point and at the Olympia. And I thought, what the fuck are you doing here, Mary, do you really need this kind of shit in your life? It was all this give him a
bottle, give him this give him that, get him on stage, wipe up his vomit. Maybe it’s just too close to the bone, but I can’t stand the people who were around him. What the fuck has he
done? The people around him, as far as I’m concerned, are like the people who used to hang around me when I was drinking, fucking leeches and hangers-on, just there for the session. At the
height of my fame I was doing seven nights a week in the Mean Fiddler in London and two nights at the Palladium, all in the same month.
I always talk about my story every time I’m asked, because I think it’s so important to talk about the reasons people drink rather than the drink and the curse of the
drink and all that. I rarely met an alcoholic or drug addict that hasn’t been through some awful sort of emotional pain. I think a lot of kids nowadays suffer from emotional abandonment.
Their parents may have been slaves to the work and acquiring money and houses and careers, and I am so happy I was okay when rearing my first three children in that I spent time with them at home.
I do think that had some sort of good effect for what was to come.
I would say with my generation, eighty per cent of the children in my class were beaten either at school or home. And I think it’s for different reasons people drink now. I
don’t think anyone has any core beliefs now any more. It’s hard to find it. I have five children from the age of thirty-three to twelve so I have an array of teenage experience in my
life. The ones now have fuck-all. I think kids are left a lot to their own devices. I don’t think there’s any guidance and I know I didn’t do it with my children. I didn’t
know what it was to be a mother and a parent. I didn’t know good parenting. I learnt parenting skills, though, and really took responsibility, and my life has changed completely because of
it.
Chapter 5
‘Now the summer is fine, but the winter’s a fridge
Wrapped up in old cardboard under Charing Cross Bridge
And I’ll never go home it’s because of the shame
Of a misfit’s reflection in a shop window pane.
So all you young people take an advice
Before crossing an ocean you’d better think twice
’Cause you can’t live without love, without love alone
Here’s the proof round the West End in the nobody zone.’
Missing You—
JIMMY MACCARTHY
I
first started thinking about Irish emigrants and their association with alcohol following a cup of coffee with
RTÉ
journalist and author Paddy O’Gorman. For the last 20 years, Paddy has been documenting the plight of Irish emigrants in England. With a mother from London and a father
from Cobh, from where so many emigrated, Paddy’s observational eye has always been well in tune with the state of the ex-pat and how it can manifest itself adversely. Or, as he explains
himself, ‘The pub is hugely important to the story of emigration.’ Paddy’s own father worked in London, all the while managing to sidestep stereotype. ‘My own dad never
drank and I came to understand that’s why he married an Englishwoman, he married outside the culture of the other Irish men. He had a visible distaste for the heavy drinking culture and an
aversion to it. He never had any time for what he called the “rubbish of pub talk”.’
Perhaps it was this personal remove that allowed Paddy to document the extent to which alcohol dominated the emigrant story. Issues of loneliness, of cultural inadequacy, of sentimentality and
of a certain amount of personal freedom from being in another place all played their part in allowing addiction and abuse to run riot. I knew it from my own limited experience in the bars of Cape
Cod, where hordes of Irish on J1 Visa programmes crammed as much drinking into a three-month stay as possible. Hey, I was one of them!
O’Gorman, though, doesn’t see emigration per se as the issue—more how we Irish act out during the transition to another environment. ‘The emigration thing in the 1980s
was a hell of a lot better than being unemployed back home. Yeah, they were paying a fortune on their flats, same as we did in Rathmines in the 1970s. I think every male negative thing tends to be
accentuated in the migrant worker. The Irish in Germany, in the 1990s, when the Berlin Wall came down, helped create a very ugly drinking scene. There was an awful lot of mad behaviour on drink and
little villages with “No Irish” signs up. These German towns were not allowing Irish in pubs any more because of young men who behaved in an absolutely disgraceful fashion.’
In moral terms, though, not everything was black and white. ‘In the eyes of many, it was a double-edged sword. While drink may have been bad, it was nowhere near as bad as sex. Drink was
nearly a kind of substitute for sexual joy. Associated with merrymaking, in Ireland the morose atmosphere of the male drinking group is different to many other countries. It’s an odd
thing.’ While others in this book have come to see the strict moral rule of the Church as manifesting itself in an unhealthy reliance on alcohol, O’Gorman sees it slightly differently.
‘It might not be a popular thing to say but we would have sank without the church, and without its influence on men abroad. I am told stories about Fr Eamon Casey and his ability to go onto
dance floors in Kilburn or Cricklewood and say, “Men, men, for God’s sake stop”. It would have an effect on guys mad with drink. These were men who would have ended up in prison
and many of them did. People like Fr Casey had a huge positive effect on Irish culture abroad.’
The Irish abroad, like many emigrants, are lacking wider societal structure, however lax, to ensure drinking patterns don’t get out of control. For example, horizontal policing by peers,
where older brothers or members of a family might tell individuals to go easy, is less apparent. ‘Ah sure, there is none of us married, we’re all separated, and that’s the
work’ is a phrase often heard among emigrants, be it in Berlin or Boston. But, perhaps there is something in the nature of the men themselves that makes them become migrant workers. A feeling
of being out of sync from an early age, of not quite fitting in. Add alcohol to those feelings, and you’re in for a whole lot of self-destructive behaviour.
‘It’s a sad life,’ says O’Gorman of the emigrant problem drinker. ‘I was working in London in 1978 with a lot of Irish guys. One day some of them were remarking
that “Jack Doyle has died.” I’d never hear of Jack Doyle, even though he was from Cobh. I rang my dad and he said he was an awful man who used to steal our chickens as kids!