Chapter 2
I’m not sure what came first—the excess or the exasperation. Both seemed to develop in tandem, to take flight together. But what I do know is that the crunch came in late summer 2004, when I was 28 years old. The writing had been on the wall for a year or so previously. Life had become chaotic. I couldn’t be on my own for very long, and was barely clinging to the remainder of a once-promising media career. If I’m honest, my son took second place to my social life. I spent my time dodging a widening circle of ex-friends who wanted nothing more to do with me. Five years after leaving secondary school, I’d gone from being a scholarship student at University College Cork to stealing sausage rolls at the hot food counter at Tesco, just so I could save money for alcohol. I had it down to an art form. My usual tactic was to go into Tesco and pick up a shopping basket. I would then walk around the store filling the basket, as if I was doing my weekly shopping. Half way through, I stopped at the hot food counter and got a few chicken drumsticks, sausage rolls and maybe potato wedges. These were eaten on my way around, before depositing the basket with an employee and asking him/her to mind it while I went outside to withdraw more money. ‘You only come in for one thing and suddenly you have a basket full,’ I remember telling one dubious employee. I never returned with the money and this became a weekly, sometimes daily, occurrence. Thankfully, I was never apprehended—I suspect the embarrassment of having to go down because of a few drumsticks and a flaky sausage roll wouldn’t have lent me much cred on the inside.
Towards the end, the highs were still fulfilling, but the lows were now more commonplace. Panic attacks began to set in, and I struggled to bring myself to look in the mirror. I drank on the breakdown of relationships. I drank on not being able to provide a proper home environment for my son. I drank out of loneliness. I drank because of insecurity, unfulfillment and arrogance. I drank because everyone else did. I drank to fit in. I drank out of frustration. I drank to feel normal. I drank and drank and drank and drank.
If I could get away without paying for anything that didn’t involve alcohol, I did, and most of the time I owed money to someone or other. I surrounded myself with male and female companions in the same boat, hiding from some aspect of life. Two episodes brought home to me that the party had to stop. The first was at the end of a two-day drink-and-drug bender, which ended up at a get-together at a friend’s house after closing hours. I was waiting on a delivery of Ecstasy, to keep the party going, when I witnessed a death. It was one of those shocking and traumatic, time-stood-still moments almost too monumental to take account of. To be honest, my first thoughts were whether or not I should still take the chemical delivery. Afterwards, I drank for two days—any excuse—and went to the funeral and sympathised with the family in a dazed state. Many months later, I gave a witness statement to Gardaí and broke down, in a windowless room with a sergeant nearing retirement scribbling frantically. Only then did I deal with what I had seen, did I realise the extent to which my life had become out of control and how fragile emotionally I was. It was a telling moment that brought me some way towards self-realisation.
The second moment that sticks out was in October 2004, at a World Cup qualifying soccer match in Paris. A group of us had decided to go to the game, taking the ferry over and driving down to Paris via Normandy. The drinking on the ferry was shocking, kind of like being at a Wolfe Tones concert for 20 hours. The ‘best fans in the world’ tag was nonsense—it was a drunken free-for-all. Teenagers slept in the cinema cradling bottles of vodka; ferry staff were abused repeatedly, while the ship’s internal PA system was taken over by drunks shouting obscenities. Marauding groups searched the cabins below for an empty bed to lie down in, while vomit and beer redecorated the carpets and decks. We found a quietish bar and sipped away nicely for the journey—the party had begun. I even managed a chorus of ‘Boys in Green’ and ‘A Nation Once Again’. I was with older friends at the time, and was in a financial mess, barely scraping together what little money I could in the week previous to have enough to get through the couple of days’ drinking in Paris. I overcame financial shortfalls by buying cheap bottles of wine. So while the others sat in restaurants or drank in bars, I hung around outside on the steps and drank, or joined them later with a bottle of wine concealed up my sleeve.
Inevitably, though, I was broke half way through the three-day trip, and so, one night, while my roommate slept, I helped myself to €100 from his wallet. I can still see myself doing it, carefully reaching under his bed for the wallet, expertly opening the button clasp that held it closed and sliding out one of the larger notes. Of that group, he’s the only one I’m still in contact with and I’ve never been able to admit what I did. Although I’m sure he was aware of it next morning. It didn’t really matter to me, though; I would have done anything to be able to continue drinking. Would have fucked over anyone, and not thought twice about it. There were countless other incidents, including getting barred from late-night clubs, abusing people verbally and not having any recollection next morning, and messing up relationships through serial infidelity.
The French weekend got to me, though. It got to me because I was with a group, all with stable relationships and steady incomes. For that weekend, at least, they were on the same level as me, out for a laugh and a good drink. Yet once the weekend ended they continued with their lives and I continued with mine. I had probably spent my week’s rent and child maintenance and would spend the next week or two playing catchup, ducking and diving to try to cover the excess. It made me realise that my ‘friends’ could dip in and out of my life and take part in the gregarious bits. I was stuck with it 24/7. I couldn’t opt out of it periodically. I remained unfulfilled, while they were laying life-markers—getting promoted, having children, buying houses. And yet, if you ask any of them today should I have stopped drinking, they will probably say I shouldn’t have. But, as I’ve said, no one knows really the true torment of the mind of a problem drinker. You don’t really even realise it yourself until long after the last hangover.
On several occasions I didn’t turn up to collect my son as expected on Saturday mornings. My time with him was now condensed to 8-hour periods on a Saturday or Sunday—the stereotypical McDonald’s dad. Because I didn’t have a proper room for him in whatever house I happened to be staying in, I would drop him back again in the evening. My timekeeping and sense of days became more erratic. I was a father in name only, nothing of a moral guide and an increasing emotional void. This lasted for maybe two years, and looking back, I find it impossible to reconcile myself now to that vacant father figure I had become. And of course I drank on the shame and the guilt of that.
I recycled stories I had heard and passed them off as my own. I was a fraud. A phoney. A fantasist. It’s alarming the depths to which human self-delusion can sink. I pretended to be writing a book, a sort of novel based on fact, or an ‘observational take on Ireland’s underbelly’. Other times, I assumed the guise of a big-shot music promoter, when the reality was that I had lost a small fortune due to negligence and bad management and chaotic bookkeeping. With no transport, when I was in the music game I would take a bus to gigs which I was promoting. If someone called me while I was en route, I’d pretend my car had broken down or that I had missed the train and was now having to endure the ‘nightmare of a bus journey!’ I’d say it out loud so the other people on the bus would be able to hear me. Yes, I was one of those incredibly annoying public-transport-grudging travellers. That’s how screwed your head gets! The reality was that a car I did part own had been repossessed when I had left it into a garage for repairs and didn’t have the money to retrieve it. It was embarrassing for my family, as a neighbour in Clare who owned a garage had organised the finance a year or so earlier. And now he had to call the finance company to arrange for it to be collected. His words were ‘That fella can’t even buy a breakfast. You’d better take it away.’
Of course there was a dawning realisation that I couldn’t continue life the way it was. Living the type of life I did, you become increasingly isolated and there are few avenues left open to you. I thought about moving abroad (most problem drinkers do at some point), toyed with the idea of returning to college and finally tried to resurrect my media career.
An editor in Clare took a chance on me and gave me a few days a week working in a local newspaper. It would be a chance to wipe the slate clean, get away from Cork for a bit and have a regular income.
I was to start in Ennis on a Monday morning. Because relations with my family had broken down, I planned to leave Cork on Sunday afternoon and stay in a B&B in Ennis. A few media friends and a girl I was seeing at the time suggested meeting in the HI-B bar in Cork for a few last jars and a toast to new beginnings. The HI-B is a curious spot, with the eccentric owner Brian O’Donnell at the helm, barring everyone from coffee drinkers to mobile phone owners. (I once heard him shout ‘SPACE INVADERS’ at a couple who had been sitting on the only couch in the pub and nursing one drink for two hours.) It had a core group of daytime professional drinkers, and was a perfect oasis in the middle of an afternoon.
My plan was to have two drinks and make an afternoon bus, which would have me in Ennis for early evening, leaving plenty of time to get accommodation for the week sorted. Two drinks became three and the crowd got bigger and the bus time got later and later. I was now intent on making the last bus, at 7.25 p.m., which would have me in Ennis for half ten or thereabouts. By 8 p.m. I was still ordering drinks and had been drinking steadily for five hours. Not exactly ideal preparation for your first morning in a new job. At 9 p.m. I said my goodbyes, convinced my female companion to come with me, walked out the door and hailed a taxi on Patrick Street in Cork.
‘Where we off to, lads?’ the driver asked.
‘Ennis, please,’ I said, ‘or Power’s Pub in Clarecastle if we make last orders.’
The job lasted a matter of days, and I was back in Cork, drinking with the same media colleagues who a week earlier had toasted my departure. It was farcical. My living situation at this time was still chaotic. I had left a house where I was sharing in order to rent a place on my own, but a month or so in I arrived home to find the locks had been changed. I was already several weeks behind on the rent, and the letting agency decided to take action. After that, I stayed in different locations, mostly spare rooms, and kept whatever possessions I had held onto under the stairs of a friend’s house. I used to change clothes and freshen up in public toilets, generally art galleries or theatres, washing my hair in the sink and giving under my arms a wipe with toilet soap and paper. When staff began to recognise me, I made up a story about the plumbing at home being on the blink. I did this for a few weeks, especially if I was in the middle of a bender and felt rough. Warped needs must.
——
One day, my parents, with whom relations had been strained for several months, called and told me they wanted to see me. I met them at St Finbarr’s Hospital in Cork, where the rest of my family had arranged for a treatment counsellor to help them confront my drinking. I sat there, silent, as they expressed their concerns. None of them knew me any more. My brothers and sisters had no real relationship with me. They wanted to know if I was willing to do something about it. Would I go back on my own the following week and provide a urine sample? I probably would have tried anything at that stage. I had become ‘sick and tired of being sick and tired’, as the manual says, and I wanted out. After the consultation, my family headed for Clare and I went on a two-day pub crawl, ending up getting barred from my local late-night bar and crying my eyes out on a side street as dawn broke. As an 11-year-old child, watching JR Ewing in ‘Dallas’ reach for a crystal decanter full of whiskey and pour, you don’t anticipate that that initial spark will lead to such inglorious finales. I knew myself at that point the game was up. I had been full of increasing self-loathing in the preceding weeks, would wake up with a sudden shock of anguish, frantically trying to remember the night previous or rampage through my pockets to find out how much money I had left. But it was the paranoia, the self-hatred and the insecurity that comes with heavy drinking that is rarely spoken of which got to me most of all. It’s the feeling deep down that you know you’re better than the existence you’ve settled for, but you know also that alcohol keeps those thoughts at bay. It waters the self-denial. It can also be a hell of a lot of fun, don’t get me wrong. I had some great nights, days and early mornings because of alcohol and whatever else went with it. And if my parents hadn’t intervened, who knows, I might even still be there in the land of mid-week benders and bullshit. I’d like to think, though, I’d have crawled out of the hole myself at some stage. Few people ever said to me, ‘You should do something about your drinking,’ but the thing is you end up surrounding yourself with the type of people who you know won’t be upfront with you. You depend on them and vice versa. In Ireland, we have such a high tolerance for the problem drinker, and in the circles I was moving—arts and media—it’s accepted even more.
I took on board what my family had said. I was the eldest and somehow meant to lead by example, yet here were my younger brother and sisters giving it to me straight. They didn’t have a brother anymore. They couldn’t believe a word I said. They said I had no interest in them and they were right. I had become completely self obsessed—my pub friends were my family by that time. It’s pathetic and shameful to think back on it, but it’s the truth.
I admitted that I was drinking too much and that it was a problem and gave a commitment to returning to the treatment service the following week. In the room with a family counsellor, I began discussing my life and how out of control it had become. By this stage, I had recently been evicted from another house I was renting, again after only six weeks, for non-payment of rent. I found this out one night, when I had persuaded a girl to come back for coffee and perhaps some third-leg boogey, only to realise all the locks had been changed. Having tried and failed to scale the outside wall, she quickly left in a cab and I settled into the coal shed. George Clooney eat your heart out. When I was sober and had some clarity on the situation, I was aware that alcohol had wreaked havoc on my life and my headspace. I knew that whatever difficulties life would have thrown up in the normal course of things were compounded 100 per cent by my overdependence on the booze.
But, as the definition goes, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I kept waiting for my life to get going, and it never really did.
I remembered a boat trip to Croatia the previous summer. It was an organised trip and I was the only single person on a boat of couples for a week. Every night, when the captain went to bed, I would help myself to the tap of beer in the main galley. It got to the point where I even poured drinks for the rest of the passengers. But something happened on that trip. I became more withdrawn, more depressed. I was prone to crying in the middle of the day on my own. Looking back, I probably had something of a mini-breakdown half way between Split and Dubrovnik. I called my mother and told her I wanted out, that the life I was living had to give. I cried and apologised.
She organised for me to take a call from my local GP in Ennis, who told me to call to a doctor soon as I got home. I did and arrived in her surgery in a mess. She said she felt really sorry for me, gave me sleeping medication and advised me to call Alcoholics Anonymous. I called, arranged to go to a meeting, and expected to be cured by the time it finished. Some of it I could relate to—the emotional toll it takes, the madness and mayhem, the skewed logic. But much of it I just couldn’t sit through—the acquired dialogue, the nostalgia and so on. I left and never went back. Six months of drinking later I was in a prefab on the grounds of St Finbarr’s hospital and it was only then that I finally began owning up to my problems. I discussed my living situation and the type of friends I was hanging around with. I talked about the panic attacks and the morbid thoughts. The counsellors listened compassionately, and following two or three meetings decided that outpatient treatment wasn’t going to work for me. I was still moving in social circles where drink was freely available and partying was ongoing. Although I had managed to stay off the drink for over a week, it was only a matter of time before I would fall back into it again, they suggested. They asked would I commit to rehab for a month. To paraphrase the poet, I said, ‘Yes, Yes, Yes.’
Mid-November 2004, and a friend dropped me off at Tabor Lodge Treatment Centre in West Cork, with a bag full of books and a head full of belligerence. To be honest, I was glad of the time out, of fresh sheets, three square meals a day and the chance to start over. My life had become one long hangover, punctuated by bouts of self-pity and short flashes of self-realisation. In Tabor Lodge, I wasn’t quite as bad as other cases; some had been to jail, others begged on the streets, while one guy snatched handbags from old ladies. Yet all of them had been at my stage on the way up, and I could relate to enough of it to know I needed to be there. The thing with alcohol or any other dependence is that it is a progressive disease. I had an insight into the future, brother, and it was murky.
I met others in treatment I could relate to and we all sort of undertook this voyage of honesty together. It was a relief to be away from the mayhem of my life for a prolonged spell. A relief, too, to get something of a second chance with family and friends. For four weeks we had daily counselling sessions, where we accounted for our actions and looked at ways to prevent them recurring. I struggled with the word ‘alcoholic’ and began to question the tenets of Alcoholic Anonymous. We were shown a video of a priest on the ‘Late Late Show’ years earlier who took a broad definition—if drinking causes you problems, then you are an alcoholic. Christ, I thought, no one in Ireland was safe! Addiction treatment was searingly honest, and offered a multifaceted approach to understanding how my life had gotten so out of control. Yet I wasn’t quite willing to buy into the one-size-fits-all formula necessary for addiction treatment. I found compulsory AA meetings tough going and couldn’t relate to the adopted diction and repetitive slogans. How many of these stories were borrowed from each other, I wondered? We’re a nostalgic race at the best of times; throw sentimentality into the mix and it felt, to me at least, like romantic war stories. That’s a personal opinion, said in the knowledge that AA is the only thing that works for so many people.
What rehab gave me, most of all, was structure and space. There was daily meditation, and long walks in the surrounding country lanes, several hundred yards from the wooded centre. Three weeks in, several of us were taken to Kinsale for an AA meeting and that was as much contact with the outside world as we had up to that point. I could take phone calls, but noticeably, few of my ‘friends’ picked up the phone.
It wasn’t without its lighter moments either—I established strong friendships, some of which endure to the present day. Several compulsive gamblers were part of the group, and often, serving dinner, I asked if their preference was for ‘Beef or Salmon’, a well-known racehorse at the time. Games of football at break time pitted the alcoholics against the drug addicts, while the first Friday night in the centre we were allowed watch a movie as a way of dealing with the weekend edginess. The choice, ironically enough, was The Shawshank Redemption. The most popular book doing the rounds in the centre, after the AA manual, was Howard Mark’s Mr Nice, his account of his years as one of Europe’s largest soft-drug dealers. Not exactly ideal reading for a bunch of addicts trying to turn their lives around, is it?
The toughest parts were when family members came to the centre to speak frankly about how my drinking had affected their lives. Or when I had to read out among the group what family and friends had to say about my drinking. There was nowhere to hide in those moments, which, of course, is exactly the point. As a group we confronted each other daily, probing our fellow addicts, and comparing and contrasting their stories with our own. It was a genuinely cathartic experience and a nurturing time spent bonding with people from outside my social and moral circle. In many ways it reaffirmed for me the universality of human experience.
For some people, the fact that I was attempting to give up drink meant the natural end of our friendship—if you could call it that. I remember one friend, who took me aside just as I was committing to the 28-day residential treatment programme. We met in a Cork bar at evening time, and he’d come up specially from the countryside to deliver his verdict. His take on it was that once I went in for treatment, it would always be a negative mark on my medical records and go against me in future life. He urged me to reconsider. All I needed was regular work, he said. A nine-to-five and everything would be fine. Needless to say, we haven’t stayed in touch. There were others who drifted away naturally, and in many cases, I only realised afterwards the extent to which certain friendships were based around alcohol and how little I had in common with those people once I left that life behind. The natural break with many of these associations came on entering rehab and there were very few of those friendships I look back on as being of value.
Studies show that only a small percentage of addicts, some say one third, others say it’s as low as 15 per cent, come out of treatment and remain sober or clean. Of the group of 18 people I was in treatment with, incorporating overeaters, gamblers, drug addicts and alcoholics, I know that some have committed suicide, others are in jail, and perhaps four or five maximum have remained on the straight and narrow.
I was one of the lucky ones. While I have every respect for Alcoholics Anonymous, I determined to stay sober largely of my own accord, and somehow it worked. I didn’t have the staying power for weekly meetings or group sharing. I felt I had given up alcohol to leave that world and its experiences behind. There was also a religious aspect to the movement, mainly Catholic, which I didn’t share, and while the association points out they are appealing to a God of ‘your own understanding’, I felt it was kind of like Sinn Féin saying they were not part of the IRA. But within AA are some incredible people, with amazing insights. Few other social groupings or organisations have the ability, through dialogue, to effect such change in their members, and I would encourage anyone in need to at least give it a try. After a month of treatment, two days before Christmas in 2004, I left Tabor Lodge. It was surreal re-engaging with Christmas decorations, packed streets and the reality of having to forage for myself again.
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?
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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.
I’d be lying, too, if I said I didn’t think about reintroducing alcohol to my life from time to time, although it’s rare. I counteract those thoughts by thinking back to when there was no real material or emotional buffer to prevent my drinking from becoming a problem. I didn’t really know how to be a parent. I didn’t know how to be a partner. I didn’t know how to make a living. I had no money and no home. Now I have all those things, and have a tight control over my life. So, surely, the logic goes that if I was to start having an occasional gin and tonic, or a glass of good wine with a nice meal, what harm could it do? It’s a debate not entirely resolved, except I think about what I have, and compare it to what I had, and don’t feel prepared to take the risk. I also don’t know what added benefit it would bring to my life. It might make certain social settings more informal, but it’s not my fault that we Irish rely so much on alcohol as a means of social interaction. It’s hard not to feel sometimes like I’m damaged goods or tainted stock or that there is an emotional lack at the core of my issues surrounding alcohol. Perhaps there’s some truth in that. Alcohol is a mood-altering substance. It helps numb experience, helps fertilise fantasy and alter behaviour. But whatever the reasons for my drinking getting out of control, I’m glad I went through that experience. It’s made me who I am today, to quote the cliché.
I used to dread the thought of going on holidays in the early stages of my sobriety. To me holidays were all about a licence to start drinking earlier and for longer. And as for interacting with locals, or dealing with social groupings, forget it—I could never have thought it possible without some form of Dutch courage. Now, though (cue birdsong), I have a newfound confidence, am constantly fascinated by new cultures and experiences, and have the clarity of mind to process those experiences.
In the last four years I have been all over the world, from eastern Congo to Mozambique, Kolkata to Tasmania. It’s ironic, but now I wonder how the hell did I ever travel and take in another culture while I was drinking? I can’t imagine waking up with a hangover, trying to negotiate a foreign tourist trail or simply plan a day’s events. I’ve a newfound confidence now and am capable of a type of honest human interaction I never had before. I feel genuinely privileged. Relations with my family have never been better; I’m financially secure and personally content. More than that, though, I can look myself in the mirror again. In fact, I quite like what I see.
Sure, life can still throw its curveballs, but I’m far better able to bat them away sans alcohol. Life is probably less extreme and more on an even keel these days. Are there times when I want to express the darker side? Sure. Because I spent so many years screwing up my career, or fumbling about trying to find one that suited me, I have a tendency to overwork now. It can become an obsession and I have to keep it in check. Genuinely, though, alcohol, or the pursuit of it, which for so many years was my raison d’être, rarely enters my head now. I feel like I’ve filed that aspect of my personality away, and, like I’ve said, look on it more as a lifestyle choice than a clinical or psychological one.
Having said that, there are still tricky moments, and times when I can feel alienated by Irish society to such an extent that assimilation would appear the easier option. Travelling abroad also still brings its own problems, especially on media trips, with any amount of free drink on offer. The thoughts begin to creep back. I could just have one final lash at it and no one would know. I wonder if I still have the same tolerance levels I had at the height of my drinking. It’s not like you can unravel all the good things in your life in a 24-hour bender, is it? So what harm would it be to have one final hurrah? The feeling is there also when I’m out with friends at a good restaurant and they labour over the wine choices before selecting a fruity little red or a crispy white vintage.
I often compare my urges to that scene in the film A Beautiful Mind when Professor John Nash is attempting to recover from the delusions that have plagued his life. One hallucination, a little girl, still haunts him, and waits at the end of his college steps, arms outstretched, asking to be allowed back into his life. For me, alcohol is always there with its hands out, asking for one final embrace. I just choose to ignore it.