Wasted (26 page)
Authors: Brian O'Connell
When I came in here I was talking about the drinking and I said maybe it was a gene because my dad was an alcoholic. Everyone was saying, ‘You can’t be blaming your dad.’ I
reckon, though, it was just a case of as soon as I got a taste for it I couldn’t stop.
I never had a problem getting served and anyway, I always hung around with lads older who got drink for me. In here I’m not around the streets, starting fights or getting beaten up. I
reckon it would be better if there were a few more treatment centres around.
[A] few of the guys I hung around with could end up in here. Some of them will never try to stop and they would have been saying to me when I came in here—‘you’re a
quitter’ and that. But I don’t give a shit. Their life is going to be ruined and I’m going to get mine back. I have to stay off it this time. I owe dealers money and they have
been calling to my house threatening to break my legs and that. I was always hanging around with older people. When I was nine years of age in England I was hanging out with eighteen-year-olds.
Most people in Ireland don’t mind the fact I have an English accent. But anyway, fuck them if they do. Whatever happened eight hundred years ago is not my fault. My brother got put in
hospital once—someone slashed him a few times. My mum is glad I’m here now. She was always worried where I was. There were times when I wouldn’t answer my phone for days and would
just disappear. She’d be driving around the whole city looking for me.
The worst thing parents can do, I think, is have a go at their kids when they come back drunk, shouting at them or whatever. That’s stupid. Whenever my mam does it, it just makes me want
to go out and drink again. I think if parents approach the situation with a little more calm. I have four weeks left here. I do my Leaving Cert Applied when I get out. Think I will stay home and
out of everyone’s way when I get out and try getting a new crowd to fall in with. If I go back to the way I was, I’m going to end up dead and I know that for a fact.
‘Paul’ is 19 and from the South. His father has chronic liver disease and introduced Paul to alcohol at a young age.
I was here last year and stayed for eight weeks and was sent home. To be honest I didn’t change the places I hung around in or the fellas I hung around with so I’m
back here.
When I left the first time, I never thought I’d smoke heroin and I smoked heroin about three months ago. I only smoked it for three or four nights and then I stopped. I had no intention of
smoking heroin but when I had eight bottles of Bulmers drank, I thought, ‘Here, fuck it, give me the heroin and show me how to do it.’
I’m drinking since I was thirteen years of age. It has had a big effect on my life. My father gave me my first drink. He gave me a can. He was drunk one night and he said, ‘Come on
in.’ He needed someone to drink with so I started to drink with him. The next day he brought me out to the pub and he gave me a pint outside. He just wanted a drinking buddy, as he
didn’t like drinking on his own. He wanted someone to talk to and have a singsong with and have a few jokes and talk about his past. I have been drinking with him ever since. It got heavier
and heavier. First I might have had vodka and a few cans. Drugs got worse. I’d drink a litre of vodka and be drunk so I’d take a line of coke to wake myself up. Drink another litre of
vodka then.
On a night out I could have two bags of cans, vodka, whiskey, anything I could get my hands on. Anything I could rob. Anything. I started to rob my family and going through a bad way. I lost my
mother when I was sixteen. Three years ago. I couldn’t deal with it. That’s when I started going on the drugs, you know, to take the pain away. My dad is still drinking. He has
cirrhosis of the liver and he was asked to go to the hospital and basically he stuck up his finger at the doctors. He keeps passing blood and his legs are very skinny. He can’t sleep and
can’t eat, just drinking and drinking.
It’s Ireland, though, and as far as I can see, everybody drinks. I think the place has gone to the dogs, to be honest. I was drinking in pubs at the age of sixteen with my dad. I used to
get money off my dad for drink. Sometimes I’d go robbing
CD
players out of cars and selling them. I broke into houses and stole plasma
TVS
. I
even broke into my school and robbed four computers out of it.
My dad admitted last year that he is an alcoholic. He went to Bushy Park for three months. The day he got out he told my sister he was just going down to pay the
ESB
bill. When she went down to the
ESB
to see what was keeping him, he was in the pub next door. My granddad was a madman for drink too. He passed it onto my father, so
it’s in the genes. But then, sometimes it’s not all about the genes. It’s not as if my father held me down and poured that can down my throat. It was my choice. That’s the
way I see it.
I dropped out of school before my Junior Cert and went straight into
FÁS
working. I was there for two years. But I’m always getting arrested for theft,
burglary and assault. I tried to commit suicide twice. I put a rope around my neck and a friend saved me. Another time I had to get twenty stitches in my hand. I went into my bathroom and got a
razor and just started slicing. I wouldn’t do it when I was sober. Not once. It’s a disease. I have to stop, because if not, the next time I pick up a drink I’ll be dead.
Most of the people I know are saying, ‘Ah sure when you get out you know you’ll go drinking again.’ This time, though, I’m going straight into a halfway house for three
months. After that I’m hoping to move to Wexford or Waterford and get a flat. You know, get away from the places where I grew up.
The more I look at it it’s getting better and better for me. I want to be a mechanic or a mason. I have a failing to appear in court and a bench warrant out on me for assault, but I have a
drugs taskforce officer looking into it for me. When I get out it’s going to be very tempting. I don’t know what’ll happen. I might last and I mightn’t last. There are
adverts on the television, it’s on posters and there’s a pub on every corner. I’ll just have to pick up the phone and call someone. I was in foster care after my mum died. They
told me, you get help for you[r] drink or you’re getting thrown out. So I decided to come here to this centre. I was only doing it to keep a roof over my head. But four weeks into it I
started to realise that my life was a disaster. All the damage I had caused. It hit me. The only person I know that doesn’t drink is my brother.
With my dad, though, there’s no hope for him. He said he doesn’t care. He stays on the couch with his bottle of Paddy and his bottle of vodka and drinks away. He only uses the car to
go to the off-licence and back. He keeps saying he has nothing to live for. We have a good relationship since I came in here. He can see me improving. It’s very safe in here. You’re not
afraid of people knocking on your door. You’re away from drugs. People in here actually listen to you. If you tried to say what you were feeling on the outside, they’ll tell you to cop
on or fuck off.
I think the government need to open up more treatment centres. There should be more clubs and organisations to take fellas like me away from the streets or even away for the weekend.
I only went drinking because of courage to talk to boys and girls and go dancing and stuff. I was very shy. Give me about eight cans and I’d talk to anyone and dance and [do] all sorts of
things. Nearly everybody I know is like that. It is getting worse if you ask me.
——
Okay, so not every child in Ireland who opens their parents’ drinks cabinet or drinks a can of cider in a field will end up in the Aislinn Centre. By choosing to present
these testimonies, I could be accused of distorting the general experience for Irish adolescents. But these testimonies are real. They exist.
The fact remains also that for those who take a wrong turn or develop an addiction at a young age, specific treatment services and approaches are wholly underdeveloped and underformalised in
this country. With an adolescent drinking problem as well-signed as ours, it seems a glaring oversight on behalf of government not to provide enough treatment facilities. We’re very good on
reports, not so on rehabilitation, it seems.
Perhaps, though, there is not enough societal pressure to enable a response. In communities such as the one I visited in Clare, the community is aware the society exists. But there is little
discussion, few collective efforts made to get to grips with the problem.
Unlike Copenhagen, where ‘outside the box’ thinking is being applied to the problem of youth drinking, from parental consensus to initiatives such as the Night Ravens, in Ireland we
seem to still have a one-dimensional and somewhat wish-based approach.
Government would like for children not to start drinking so young. Secondary school students, like those in Clare, express a desire for something else to do. So, despite arthouse and mainstream
cinemas, more theatres and arts centres, specific youth-orientated gigs, an infrastructure of bowling and arcade centres, well funded sports facilities, additional skate parks and more
opportunities for international travel, there is still nothing for young people to do except get out of it. Until parents are able to provide an example of life without alcohol abuse, then perhaps
youth-orientated thinking will continue to be blurry. The focus therefore needs to be more on parents than policies, more on personal responsibility than limiting access. Generations of Irish
children grow up seeing alcohol as part of their parents’ lives and experience. The token dialogue we have been having with youths is clearly inadequate and needs to be sharper, more relevant
and less preachy. It needs to talk about issues such as emotional need, love, friendship, sexual health, peer pressure, respect and social acceptability.
A recent
EU
survey pointed out that the cost of alcohol misuse in the
EU
is estimated at about €125 billion, equivalent to 1.3 per cent of
gross domestic product. So in a very real sense, addressing the problem at a young age saves society, financially and socially. With the real cost of alcohol in Ireland dropping at an alarming rate
in the past two decades, and youngsters having more disposable income, coupled with the altering of traditional family structure, a perfect storm for the acceleration of alcohol abuse has been
raging. Little has been done to have young persons speak to young persons to allow the dialogue between policymakers, health officials and others to include those most in need. The Pioneer movement
are calling for abstinence for all under-18-year-olds—yet that already exists in law in Ireland. What’s needed is a maturing of attitudes and a stricter enforcement of present
legislation. The government sees the problem as parents’ responsibility. Parents see it as a government problem. The health lobby sees the problem but can’t get action to tackle it. The
drinks industry sees the problem but takes small, somewhat insignificant steps to tackle it. In the meantime, the cycle continues.
I
started drinking before I joined the Civil Service. I was put in a new section with fellas just discharged from the
Army. On pay day they would bring me down to the pub and of course I would be pissed out of my mind, and I wasn’t even eighteen years of age.
These boys would really give it a lash, and that was normally on payday, which was twice a month. At a young age it was regarded as absolutely natural that this was what you
did. They regarded me as a sort of mascot. Of course, I was also great use as I was the only one who spoke Irish very well. A lot of stuff that came up though the Department would have Irish in
it—forms and so on—so they came to rely on me. It was the Statistics Department and the job we were working on was a tabulation of the 1946 census. It was the first time any kind of
mechanical information-gathering was in use, at a time when statistics and all that were in their infancy. Everything was punched onto cards and they were fed into machines and so on. Some of
the equipment was so new that if you put your foot on the pedal and kept it there for an extra ten seconds, the machine would go on fire. Of course the engineer would have to be called from the
firm that supplied the stuff and we would all have three or four hours off. They twigged to that in due course, but is just shows you how basic the whole thing was. I mean, it was like being
there at the invention of the typewriter. Here we were two hundred years later at the start of the electronic revolution, and I was beginning my drinking life.
The natural thing to do was to go out on payday and get smashed and that was it.
You might get the weekend out of it, but once you did that and paid your digs you would be broke. It was always pints back then, or you might have the odd half one. Because I
was the youngest they would give it to me and have a laugh with it. But the thing was, there was nothing strange about starting to drink almost after you had left school. I had gone straight
from school to the Civil Service. So, I became very used to it and it drinking became second nature very early on. I would think nothing of going in and having a pint in a pub on my own at
eighteen years of age, if I had the price of it.
Come to think of it, I didn’t drink pints that much—I drank bottles of stout. It was only a bit later when I started drinking with Dublin fellas that I started on
pints. But then, once I started, I just drank and drank and drank, until I was about forty-three years of age, and then I stopped.
I think on my game, acting, or in any of the arts or in literature, it is a bit of myth that you have this license to drink. There were some very famous examples, such as
Brendan Behan, who would be absolutely smashed and was a genuine sort of alcoholic case. I would say with others like Richard Harris it was more of an attention thing. He did drink heavily,
okay, but perhaps he exploited that reputation quite deliberately, whereas Brendan had no control over it. If he got pissed he got pissed and the resulting publicity happened accidentally
rather than he set out to get attention. Because Brendan was a clever man in his own way, and if he wanted publicity he was sure to be able to control what type of publicity he would get.
I think even still the whole Irish attitude to drink is very stupid. Drink, to my mind, is a fucking curse. It needn’t be, but in many cases in Ireland, those who drink
have a problem of some description with it. They tend to deny it or cover it up or control it. The whole attitude here is wrong, from the government approach to the
GAA
sponsorship by Guinness. So you have thirteen-year-olds going out onto a sporting field and sponsored by the biggest drinks company in the country—that to me is . . . outrageous. I think
that has been stopped now, but it should have never happened at the very beginning.
The association with drinking in Ireland seems to me to be a Celtic thing. All the Celtic races seem to do it. I suppose an Irishman without a pint is like an Italian without a
glass of wine. I regarded it as natural until I began to have big problems with it.
I had big domestic problems with it. Also when I was young and lashing back pints, there was no great problem about it because I wasn’t responsible to anybody. Then I got
married, and later, when the kids were growing up, my drinking began to be a problem. I wouldn’t really drink at home, but having said that, if I came home drunk and if there was stuff
there in the house I’d lash into that too.
When I was in New York and the
Borstal Bo
y was on and I was a public figure playing Brendan Behan and I would lash into it. And they used it for publicity and so on. At
that time I had great health and it wouldn’t affect me. I was in my thirties then. In fact, my fortieth birthday in New York, I remember getting very depressed and getting pissed because
I was going to be an old man!
Eventually, I had to stop. I did so in the end because I had a very sane doctor, who said, ‘You can drink the way you drink and you can work the way you work, but you
can’t do both. It’s none of my business, it’s up to you.’
That, to me, was putting it right on the line and I just had to face the facts. I stopped drinking and I went to
AA
for a while. I used to go to
meetings, and funnily enough I stopped going to meetings but I never went back drinking. When I made my mind up that was it.
The anonymity part of
AA
didn’t bother me—I know some people with public profiles find that hard. Most people who go there go to help
themselves; it’s one of the great things about the fellowship. They are concerned about their own problem and the open confession and so forth. I think people trying to stop drinking are
not really going to start peering into the secrets of others. They are there to help themselves. You can rely on an
AA
meeting to help you and guard your secret.
Once I stopped drinking, I lost ninety per cent of my friends. It would be just ‘Hello’ and they would walk on. Mind you, a lot of that would be helpful, as they
would be thinking, ‘We can’t put him in the way of drink.’ Whereas with others it would be, ‘Yerrah fuck him, he’s only a bore.’
I couldn’t not go into bars after I stopped drinking; it was part of my life still. I noticed, though, when I went to England and America, people went into pubs and some
didn’t have a drink at all. They went in there to have food and they went in there to have coffee and they talked. The only people who deliberately went in there to get hammered were all
alcoholics anyway.
I noticed, too, that I got more work when I stopped drinking, once people realised I was sober, then I used to get plenty work. For instance, I got an awful lot of work in
England on television and stage and so on because people in the business knew I was reliable now and not a drunken Paddy. If you had an Irishman who didn’t drink, not only would he be
talented, but sober as well.
And to be honest once I stopped and once I began to be very happy being sober, I never gave it thought again, simply because I was happier. Now, if I had been more miserable I
probably would have gone back to it.
The only thing, and I had to realise this quickly, is that you have to cut out your mates. Fuck them. Because if they want to drink, they want you to drink. You have to
cultivate a whole new circle . . . of people who are not going to be dragging you in for a pint. You develop a different range of social experiences or meet people who like you because you
don’t drink or have stopped drinking.
It very easy to say pub friendships are useless but in many cases I found that they were, really. When the time comes and you want to go back to one of your old drinking mates
for a hand in something, he doesn’t want to fucking know you. I’m only talking about people who themselves have a basic problem even though they may not know it.
The majority of ordinary drinkers, people who go in for a pint, two or three nights a week, well, they are a different story, then. I’m talking about people who I used to
drink with and who expected me to drink and then when I didn’t I was a lost cause.
If I look at Ireland today the patterns of drinking is a sort of bravado. If you ask me what do I think of Irish society at the moment, I think it’s a fucking awful
country. I think there [is] no respect whatsoever for people or sensitivities or rights. If you have the money you can do whatever you like and ride roughshod over everybody, until you fall off
the horse and then fuck you, then they’ll kick you around. I mean, this is strong talk but I react very strongly to the way anybody with money seems to have the right to do whatever they
like.
The old pub scene, too, is gone completely. When you went on holidays down to Lahinch or Crosshaven or towns like that, at certain times of the night, maybe three or four pints
in, someone would be called on to sing. People had their party piece which they did and it was all very low-key and humorous and civilised. You’d hear the same jokes every night about the
same people and it was relaxed and very rarely was there pugnacious behaviour. That is not the case now, I don’t think.
I’ll leave you with one of my favourite drinking stories:
I used to serve at twelve o’clock Mass, and I was supposed to serve Mass for the Bishop one Sunday. I got a call that one of the lads in
AA
. . .
was after breaking out and he wanted to see me. My problem was that if I got to see him I wouldn’t be able to go and serve Mass for the Bishop. I thought about it and said, ‘The
Bishop can always find someone else to serve the Mass.’
Not only did I not serve the Mass, I didn’t even go to Mass, which at that time was a heavy thing to do. I thought that I had helped the guy and said to myself the man
above would understand and would forgive me . . . that is, if there is anyone up there. And there fucking well better be, because otherwise it’s an awful fucking waste of drink . . .