Wasted (2 page)

Staying sober and having what might be termed ‘a fun night out’ are often mutually exclusive for Irish people. A sober night is to be endured rather than enjoyed. In company,
you’re a lift home, a finder of bags and coats, a shoulder to cry on. With the advent of late-night bars, the art of conversation has been further muted, overdubbed by slurs and sound
systems. Irish publicans have confused overbearingly loud music with atmosphere. I’m beginning to sound like your parents. I know. And that’s the other thing with this sobriety
lark—it’s hard not to over-moralise, testing to remain non-judgmental. It’s difficult to offer insight without sounding like you’re casting a shadow from the moral high
ground. To comment without patronising. Over the coming pages, I have attempted to lay down a recollection of my own journey from adolescent experimentation to problem drinking and beyond.
Following from that there is an engagement with the wider issues of alcohol abuse and Irish society. Drinkers, like those I encountered in London and Tipperary, can be at once deluded and
insightful, warm and revolting. It was my intention to portray that world in an authentic manner, interfering as little as possible in its telling.

Along the way countless persons have helped me with publication and I owe them a huge debt of gratitude. Fergal Tobin at Gill & Macmillan was the first publisher to pick up the phone and
broach the subject of turning my thoughts into a book. Others such as John Leahy, Dr Chris Luke, the Night Ravens in Copenhagen, Mannix Berry and Catriona Molineaux, Shane Malone, Sophie Johnston,
Professor Joe Barry, Faith O’Grady and many more, all gave freely of their time and I am hugely thankful to them for their contributions and observations. As for those who told me their own
stories, the people I met in London and Tipperary, in the Aislinn Centre in Kilkenny or casually along the way, I remain full of admiration for their honesty and daily struggle. Others who allowed
their stories and insight to weave through the narrative—Mary Coughlan, Mark O’Halloran, Niall Toibin, John Leahy, Frances Black and Des Bishop—added enormously to the variety of
the text and were very giving of their time and patience.

Even after spending a year examining the subject of alcohol abuse and consulting widely on the topic, I’m still unclear as to why I ended up a ‘problem drinker’. I’m not
sure the pathology matters, though, as much as the personal approach to dealing with the issue. Sometimes, we can get too caught up in the ‘why’ rather than dealing with the ‘what
now’. I’m conscious, too, that I have taken a particular editorial line when talking about the relationship between the Irish and alcohol. Many of those interviewed had acute
difficulties with alcohol. Of course not everyone who drinks runs into problems. Moderate drinking is a fine means of social interaction. I’d be at it myself if I was able and there are
plenty in Ireland, from individual publicans to large brewing companies, able to articulate the merits of such socialising. For this publication, though, my interest lay more in the point where
moderate drinking becomes problem drinking, both on a personal and societal level, and what the consequences of that change are and how it can be dealt with.

In my personal life I realise I have been incredibly fortunate. My struggles have given me a different understanding of life in Ireland—something of an outsider’s lens, perhaps. I
only hope I have done the subject justice and offered some added understanding of what, or who, drives us to drink the way we do.

T
he first time I got drunk was 1991. I know this because after a naggin of Bacardi, I thought I was a fighter pilot who sang
U
2’s hit single ‘One’ (released in November that year) while simultaneously and indiscriminately bombarding the urban sprawl below—in this case Stephen
Corcoran’s first-floor landing—with the remnants of a snack box from Enzo’s takeaway. Analyse that.

I remember little else, except a feeling of otherworldliness, of having pushed through the fur coats at the back of my mind and entered a new exciting universe, where the drink and I shared the
throne. Growing up in a town like Ennis, where one local swimming pool had signs stating, ‘No Heavy Petting in the Deep End’ and graffiti such as ‘Heavy Metle, Loud and
Poud’, there wasn’t much else to do besides getting out of it. In fact, practically every conversation from the age of about 14 onwards revolved around drink or, more to the point, how
to get it. You were judged by how many pints you could hold, where you could get served, how sick you got and what the consequences were. You talked about the easiest off-licence to get served in,
what bars and nightclubs accepted fake ids, and what were the best spirits to mix together. There were buses organised to nightclubs in neighbouring towns, which turned into rampaging drink tours
of places like Gort and Lahinch. There were teenage discos where drink was hidden in urinals hours beforehand. There were cans in the cinema, bottles at dawn on scouting weekends. There was even a
healthy bootleg market, where alcohol and cigarettes which were stolen from local grocers were sold at knockdown rates. Everything, and I mean everything, revolved around drink.

Looking back, my drinking career was more Pádraig Harrington than Tiger Woods, a steady rise as opposed to a dramatic and alarming early introduction. In fact, most Irish teenagers would
have had the same type of experiences as I had. There was no real self-destruct button in evidence at that point, and my adolescent boozing would have been considered routine by Irish standards.
Faking
ID
cards, siphoning a bit of spirits from the drinks cabinet at home or slowly building up my tolerance levels from two pints of Carling to three—it was all
pretty normal stuff.

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.

——

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 supply was expensive, the
quantities involved were small.