Authors: Brian O'Connell
The key to my sustained sobriety was that I got lucky very quickly. Work opportunities came along within weeks of rehab ending, which enabled me to draw a clear link between sobriety and
professional fulfilment. It also gave me the space to start afresh with friends and family and allowed me the breathing space to put things right in my personal life. A clear distinction was
emerging between life with alcohol and life without. I could pay the rent. My son stayed over. I got a cat and went back playing golf. Simple things. The other key was that I managed to rent a nice
house, a little outside the town centre, and a friend who had a similar outlook on life at the time rented a room. So we both became buffers for each other’s sobriety, and for a year it was
all staying in watching the television with Ballygowan and biscuits. That time away from socialising, though, was needed. I had to get to know myself again without the luxury of alcohol to access
my emotions. Somehow, it worked out. My advice to anyone who feels addiction is taking over his or her life is to abandon ego and seek help. There is an alternative life available; it just takes a
little while to find it, that’s all.
When I look back now, my introduction to alcohol came through the usual routes—the odd bottle of Harp here or sips of Bacardi there. I’m not quite sure why my formative experiences
led to issues in later life. All I know is that by the time my late twenties came around I’d come to rely more and more on alcohol as a means of social and personal interaction. The
counsellors in rehab pointed to the fact that being the first in my family to pursue academia may have been a trigger. Others felt that becoming a father in my early twenties also had something to
do with it, while my genetic makeup also played its part. I’m not sure any of those explanations are in any way valid. For me, I drank because I could, and more often than not because it made
me feel better about myself. Simple as that, really. It was when it stopped making me feel better that things began to unravel. On reflection, my addiction was not particularly severe. I had no
ongoing health problems, no criminal convictions, and at its height, I still had a few people around who were willing to invest their time in me. I didn’t need a drink first thing in the
morning and could go days, perhaps even a week, without it.
Some months back, I called a respected French journalist in Paris, asking for some contacts for a later chapter. I mentioned I was writing a book following experiences I wrote about in the
Irish Times
article. ‘Oh yeah, I read that article—I didn’t think you were an alcoholic, though,’ she said.
So am I an alcoholic, then? Well, it depends on who’s asking. The term ‘alcoholic’ has much more severe connotations in Ireland than in the United States, say. To be called an
alcoholic in Ireland, a person has to be at the very rock bottom, at such a low point that society is no longer willing to tolerate their presence at the national party. So, in that context, in the
extreme definition of the term, I probably don’t fit the definition. But if an alcoholic is someone for whom drinking causes problems, then hands up, that’s me. I’m more inclined
towards the phrase ‘problem drinker’—it has less social stigma and more practical connotations. And anyway, what’s definition got to do with it?
As time has gone on and I’ve begun to fit into a life without alcohol, I’m less concerned with how many drinks I had at the height of my drinking. I’m less concerned with what
grade of seriousness my problem was at. I’m less concerned with what people may think and with labelling.
What I know is this. When I left rehab, two days before Christmas in 2004, I had €60 in my pocket. I went from there to a mattress on the floor of a friend’s spare room with two
broken springs shooting up through the middle. I wouldn’t have gotten so much as a stamp from the bank. My media career was in the doldrums. I had to re-engage with fatherhood responsibly. I
was left with a handful of friends. In a social setting I had little to offer—my confidence was shot, I was still paranoid and had yet to feel wholly comfortable walking down the street.
Now, five years on, I’m a homeowner, with a wonderful career, a great family, a beautiful son, a partner, I enjoy conversation and I like me. I actually like me. So again, was I an
alcoholic? I honestly don’t know. But what I do know is that none of the things in my life right now were appearing on the horizon while I was falling out of late-night bars several nights a
week. I know also that living a sober life is not that big a deal. It’s a readjustment, sure, but it’s very doable readjustment if you get a break or two along the way. Having said
that, living in Ireland it’s easy to be carried along by the feeling that everyone else seemed to be drinking the same amount as I was and didn’t have an issue. If you allow those
thoughts to play themselves out, it can be dangerous. Even now when I say to people I don’t drink because it was a problem, most people want to know how much I used to drink. They want to be
able to quantify it in numerical terms. We have an obsession with quantity in Ireland when it comes to alcohol—how many pints? Was it every day? Did you spend much money? What was the most
you ever drank?
But that line of questioning misses the point. It’s the psychological debris that goes along with heavy drinking that wreaks most havoc on the individual. It’s the feeling of
worthlessness, the compromised morality, the loss of self and identity. Those are the things inside the mind of every problem drinker to a greater or lesser extent. I was never one to hide bottles
under toilets or behind cupboards, because I didn’t have to. I lived in a society that encourages you to be upfront about your excessive drinking.
In fact, there are probably thousands of people living the same sort of life I led and functioning away, seemingly content. For me, though, it got to a point where alcohol laid siege to my
morality and sense of self-worth. I realised that at a young age, leaving plenty time to start afresh without too much irreparable damage to confront. Others are not so lucky.
Much of the time, I had an inner voice trying to convince me I was too young to have a drink problem. Sometimes I wondered if it wasn’t all in my head. Perhaps if I got a nice girlfriend,
or change of location, it would all be fine. When dependence becomes an issue, you start making all sorts of side deals with your fading conscience: maybe you can just cut down. Stick to the
weekends or cut out spirits and just drink at home. An alcoholic is someone on a bridge with a brown paper bag and you start trying to convince yourself you’re not nearly as bad as
those
people. But there will always be extremes in any illness, and it’s up to the individual which stage you want to identify with.
When my career began to take off once again, as a journalist I was very conscious of speaking publicly about my views on alcohol and my personal experience. There are too many
‘one-person’ journalists in the world without me adding to the genre, I felt. But as time went on I felt compelled to make my views known, to not hide behind the fact that I drank and
now don’t. Although I have been careful not to let my sobriety become the dominant theme in my life, and even writing this, I’m conscious that I could become easily stereotyped as the
ex-drinker willing to exploit his experience for a story. I also don’t want to define myself simply by virtue of the fact that I don’t drink.
So while I’m wary of adding to the canon of rehab stories churned out on an almost weekly basis, the interaction between sobriety and society in twenty-first-century Ireland remains a
hush-hush affair. If you’re sober in Ireland, the general message is to keep it to yourself and not spoil things for the rest of society. My reasons for putting my story down are simple: for
years, I advanced my dependence on alcohol in a very public forum, whether it was staggering out of a bar mid-afternoon or turning up at a media launch the worse for wear. And now I’m
supposed to keep schtum because I don’t do any of that any more. Because now I don’t fit the stereotype, and perhaps that makes people uncomfortable.
It’s been five years since I spat out the hooch and turned my back on the world of libation. Five years, and not so much as a Bailey’s cheesecake has passed my lips. While the first
few months were undoubtedly tough going, now I don’t have time to think about going out and getting hammered. I have seen and witnessed a different Ireland. It takes a bit of getting used to,
and some situations I’ll never be wholly comfortable with.
What I’ve found is that late-night socialising in Ireland is not exactly a spectator sport. When I do go out, it gets to a point, usually after 11 p.m. and before 12 p.m., when I make my
excuses and leave. I don’t like the smell of bars at closing time. I don’t like spilled beer or soggy beer mats. I don’t like elbows and staggering, pub talk and cover bands. All
the things I would have loved about bars—the escapism, the camaraderie and the craic—I can’t quite relate to anymore. If anything it’s a little self-isolating. And I am
first to admit, especially for the first year of my sobriety, I sometimes tended to shut myself off from the world. It’s a hell of a lot easier than remaining socially active. Part of that is
because I feel comfortable in my own skin now and enjoy the more mundane aspects of life.
But self-isolation is a danger, particularly in Ireland, where the pub, or more specifically alcohol, still plays such a central role. It’s one of the reasons why
AA
meetings often become such a huge social outlet for some people in recovery. In many ways, they’re recreating the best aspects of the pub in a dry setting. Compulsive
12-steppers or ex-addicts addicted to recovery, they exist, sure. When I rang Tabor Lodge and told them of my decision not to continue with weekly counselling and
AA
meetings, I remember them telling me it was the first step on the road to relapsing. They have to say that—it’s a blanket approach. I get it. But deep down I think I knew that this was
one I needed to work through on my own.
Sometimes, when I am out, I’m met with curiosity—the journalist who doesn’t drink. Other times people feel self-conscious around me, and feel like I’m judging them purely
by virtue of my sobriety. Maybe I am. And maybe it’s hard not to. I find weddings hardest and least fun of all. There’s a hedonistic attitude at weddings in Ireland. I’ve lost
count of the number of times I’ve been at a wedding where people at the table will tell each other how drunk they’re going to get. There’s the church, the meal, a few speeches and
then anything goes and conversation slips out the side door unnoticed. Perhaps it’s because weddings are in a way a display of deep affection or romantic emotion and as a nation we need to
get inebriated in order to be comfortable around those types of feelings, expressions and emotions.
Visiting relations in Galway recently, we went looking for a local bar to watch a soccer match. Entering the bar, early on a Sunday, one of the locals was fairly well on, wearing a knitted Aran
hat and conducting several conversations at once. He’d clearly had a late one the night before and had an early start that morning to help recuperate. It turns out he was, until recently, the
local bachelor in the village, who held up the bar most nights. He had his own seat at the bar, one of those kings-of-the-counter types. One night a lady sat on his seat while he was in the toilet.
‘That’s my seat,’ he said on his return, and they hit it off. (Try turning that into an opera.) Anyway, they got married, and one of the conditions of the marriage was that he
kept a handle on the drinking. The day we met him was the day after his wedding. It was 12.30 p.m. on a Sunday and he was completely inebriated. Not exactly a precursor to wedded bliss, is it?
——
My drink of choice these days is a sparkling water. If it’s the weekend, I might ask for a dash of lime. You know, push the boat out. If people ask, I normally say I used
to drink but was in danger of becoming a cliché, so I knocked it on the head. I sometimes go months without going to a bar. It’s not that I consciously avoid the social scene, just
that I have other priorities in my life now. I have never gone to a disco since I got sober. I don’t see the point and have only been in late bars for afternoon coffee.
At the heart of the Irish experience, there is a need to filter the way we experience the world, be it through drink or drugs. Why is that? We’re in danger of drinking ourselves into a
national stupor. Reality alone is not enough, and issues of self-esteem, mixed with our newfound arrogance and recent deflation, have created an Ireland on an endless bender. My payback for living
in this Ireland is to leave it as much as possible. In other countries, no one can point to the person standing at the bar drinking a sparkling water and say for certain, ‘That’s the
alcoholic.’ Can the same be said of Ireland? We have an all-or-nothing mentality that is playing itself out seemingly unchecked. Or perhaps I’m being overly sensitive, applying my own
black-and-white relationship with alcohol to what should be a case of personal moderation for everyone. I’m more interested, though, in how Irish society copes with its problem drinkers.
I’m interested in how they drink and why and what the consequences are. I started out on this book wanting to hear what the government is doing about it, what the health sector thinks and
what happens in other countries. I want to hear how drinkers become drinkers, what make them tick and, for those who have given it up, how they find living in Ireland since getting sober. I was on
a radio show recently and the researchers had gone onto the streets of Dublin to speak to people about drinking.
They asked one girl, ‘Would you go out with someone who doesn’t drink?
Her reply was ‘No way.’
In how many other countries in the world would you get that type of response?
Abuse of alcohol caused me to lose my way, but also allowed me to find out who I am. The way I viewed the world had been filtered from the age of 15 onwards through alcohol, so in a very real
sense, giving it up meant a re-engagement with adolescence. Relationships, conversation, weekends, sex, love and living all had to be re-learned.