Chapter 3
It’s 10 a.m. on Monday morning in a rural village in north Tipperary. The owner of the bar is putting on the kettle, stocking the shelves and getting ready for his morning shift of regulars. Every bar has them—the core group of daytime drinkers who prop up the bar and the profits and are first in and often last out. There are only two bars left in the village now—the drink-driving/smoking ban has seen to the closure of others, or perhaps the area was overpopulated by public houses in the past.
I hadn’t spent a day in a bar for a few years and wanted to observe a group of daytime drinkers in a traditional Irish setting. Looking back, there was a time I could think of nothing better to do with a day than plonk myself on a high stool. Often I’d start off with a white wine (to convince myself I wasn’t drinking, because wine, as any regular drinker will tell you, isn’t alcohol at all), switch to pints mid-afternoon and finish the evening with gin and tonics or tequilas and grapefruit. If the truth be told, I was a little apprehensive and slightly edgy at the prospect of entering a bar again for a whole day. For the first year after giving up the drink, I didn’t really set foot inside a bar, beyond a quick hello and perhaps a mineral. I was worried who might see me and afraid that someone could misinterpret the situation and get word out I was back on the gargle. Even now, almost five years on, I have a two- or three-hour limit on how long I can spend in a bar. Having said that, there is one bar I feel totally comfortable in (cue prepaid endorsement)—the Corner House on Coburg Street in Cork. It’s a funny one because I would have done a fair bit of drinking in the bar in the past. But I feel relaxed there because most of the staff and regulars know my story and so the tension when I approach the bar isn’t there as it might be in other places (begin Cheers soundtrack—‘Making your way in the world today . . .’). If I ordered a pint, in other words, there would be raised eyebrows and a disapproving reaction (everybody: ‘Taking a break from all your worries sure would help a lot’). The bartenders are safekeepers of my sobriety by virtue of the fact that they are aware of my circumstances (chorus: ‘Where everybody knows your name’). Also, Fergal, the owner, does a great pot of coffee with a free chocolate thrown in. And if that doesn’t grab you, he only charges €1.50 for a Ballygowan (and that includes a dash of lime). Carlsberg definitely don’t do sober joints, but if they did . . .
In most places, there’s a seemingly carefree abandon to the life of a daytime drinker, with the pub like a kindly uncle who wraps his arms around you and protects you from the outside world. Call it safety in declining numbers. The life of the daytime drinker, though, is one of avoidance, of dodging calls and dinners, of skewed budgeting and yesterday’s clothes. It’s a life of empty retching and remorse, of diarrhoea, headaches, hangovers, holding on to emotions you should have let go of a long time ago and lost causes. The smoking ban has interrupted that closed world, brought the daytime drinker outside the intoxicated womb for nicotine inhales, holding him up against regular life. I used to notice it most outside the early houses near Cork’s Union Quay. Charlie’s Bar, for instance, where early-morning drinkers were forced to take their cigarette breaks outside the door, in the heart of the business and legal district. Many of them would have been familiar with the family law courts around the corner or the maintenance payments office next door. And here they were, being forced to display their antisocial antics in front of society. Charlie’s quickly added a smoking room at the back of the bar, thereby eliminating the need for early-morning punters to see or be seen. The hidden life of the daytime drinker could remain hidden for another while longer.
The drinking in the bar on the Monday morning I visited was progressive and steady. Four regulars stood or sat at the bar—one of them going through four pints of Carlsberg in 46 minutes, while another had six large bottles of Guinness in a little over an hour. They weren’t exactly sipping it, in other words. The conversation was of bicycles left behind after a night’s drinking, of neighbouring villages where bars close at 3 p.m. on a Sunday, and memories of a regular who had passed away weeks earlier. Some of them kept their money in glasses cases, while others carefully counted out loose change—leftover debris from the weekend’s drinking. I was told a story of one regular who went to a local doctor with a pain in his side. It was suggested by the medic that this could be his liver in need of help.
‘How many units of alcohol would you have a week?’ asked the doctor. ‘Jesus, I don’t know,’ said the regular, ‘maybe a hundred?’
‘You realise 2 units makes up one pint?’
‘Better make that a hundred and fifty, so.’
(This reminded me of a similar tale from Mallow in Cork, of a hardened drinker visiting his GP with severe stomach pains. The doctor, knowing full well what lay behind his patient’s medical problems, asked, ‘How many pints would you drink in an evening?’
‘No idea, Doctor,’ came the reply.
‘Could we say three or four?’ probed the medic.
‘Jesus, I’d spill that in a night,’ came the reply.)
The bar was traditional in form and function—a lounge in one part and a small bar in another, with room for a pool table and plenty big enough to cater for functions. Old LPS vied for wall space with GAA snapshots from intercounty and local teams. In all, the bar caters for up to 20 steady daytime drinkers, some of whom clock in early and might return at different intervals throughout the day. By 1.30 p.m., the racing channel was turned on and bets were being placed. The clientele were made up of a patchwork of ruddy, lined faces, patched jackets, unkempt hair and shaky hands. Mostly the age profile was over 40, single, and hardened, with only one female popping in for a coffee while I was present. There was a steady stream walking in and out, answering phones, churning bottom lips, perhaps trying to erase things to do from their memories as they faced into another fresh pint.
They looked pained and pleasured and, if I’m honest, part of me would have loved to have pulled my barstool close, swapped my tea for a crisp, cold pint of Carlsberg and joined in the craic. I began to visualise that moment of holy transition from the remnants of one pint to a freshly poured one. The feeling as the beer began to settle into an empty stomach, having taken time to get comfortable in its surroundings. The writer Eugene O’Brien has a line in the play Eden, when one of the characters is having the first pint of the morning after a heavy night and remarks that the new beer is meeting the old beer and both are getting on just fine. I could see that moment in the faces of the regulars, as that first-mouthful grimace turned to a grin, and the shakes began to recede.
The barmaid was like Nurse Ratched, carefully measuring out the medicine (mostly large bottles of stout) with the inmates (regulars) chatting amicably through the dispensing.
The inmates in this case were all bad teeth and tense expressions, unfurling crumpled notes, checking watches and grabbing the barmaid’s eye in a sort of wink-and-elbow language of transaction. Few of them asked for a drink by name, their liquid leanings known intimately to the staff behind the dispensary.
By 2.17 p.m., one of the regulars, now on his sixth pint of the day, was close to not being offered any more.
‘Have you anything to tell me?’ he asked the bar worker.
‘No, have you?’ came the reply, as he was given his last pint.
He had been in the bar since 10.50 a.m. that morning and was beginning to get a little what we might call rowdy. Perhaps sensing he had become centre of attention, he made his first statement of the day:
‘Do you remember back the years, there was a show, “Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em”?’
‘I do,’ I said.
‘Well by Christ she had a right one when she had me!’
I couldn’t argue with him, really.
While I was sitting there wondering whether I should introduce myself or remain in the background observing, one guy walked over and asked how the book was going. My cover was blown (aside from the fake glasses and nose, the tape recorder and frantic note-taking probably gave the game away).
Without prompting, ‘John’ began to tell me his life story, beginning with the blunt fact that he had tried to take his own life three times over the past few years. The last time was in Dungarvan, he said, when he had to be fished out of the water. While he was telling me his story, his mobile rang every few minutes—his 18-year-old daughter trying to get him home. Five years earlier his relationship with his daughter’s mother had broken up. Had he ever tried to knock the drink on the head, I asked.
‘I managed to stay off the drink for about nine weeks after I had residential treatment; that’s as long as I ever lasted.’
A fortnight earlier, John had again tried to stay off the booze, but broke out and was now on his fourth day of solid drinking. He had a rising list of medical conditions, including a swollen heart, and his daughter was partly calling to ensure he took his medication and didn’t miss an appointment with a specialist later in the week. He had missed the previous two appointments. ‘The doctor told me it’s not entirely my fault,’ he said, ‘it’s more the country I live in. I know everything my daughter is saying is right but I can’t hear her because of the drink. Once I get a taste for it, that’s it.’
He worked here and there wherever he could, but arthritis prevented him from working a regular week. He sounded resigned to his fate. ‘Treatment wouldn’t work for me, I tried it,’ he said.
When I asked him how many drinks per day he got through, he said he wasn’t able to answer. ‘I might work a few hours and help out around the place here and then I could drink for another few hours. My daughter is on the phone saying I will have to go back to treatment, but I can’t relate to the people in there. A lot of the men are violent with the drink but not me. Looking back on my life, drink just got the better of me.’
The fact that ‘John’ was willing to speak openly about his addiction and his attempts to tackle it confirmed something I have noticed over the past few years—that drinkers were becoming more open about alcohol-associated illnesses. The bar worker and wife of the owner confirmed as much, when I brought up the subject with her. ‘I don’t think there is as much of a stigma anymore. I know the lads in during the day will still slag about it. Some of them might have been in psychiatric wards but will see that more for depression rather than drink. I think the stigma thing is going.’
Getting treatment is one thing, though; being able to remain sober after treatment is the tricky part. ‘It’s extremely hard if they don’t have supports,’ said the bar worker, ‘unless a wife or someone is getting onto you about it, it is a real battle. If you have a job and stuff then fine, you may be able to make it. The difference is that you need to have another life outside of the pub. For guys who don’t have another outlet, what are you going to do? Are you going to say is it worth my while to sit here? I imagine if I was in their place I would be thinking, so what will I do, sit at home seven nights a week?’
The question of how these regulars finance their drinking lifestyle is beginning to resonate more, now that the economic boom has been left behind. But where there’s a wino, there’s a way. ‘One of the guys coming into us is drinking some amount at the moment and I’ve been thinking, where is he getting the money?’ said the bar worker. ‘Someone told me he is selling cigarettes on the black market. A lot of people are on the dole and they work cash in hand. This worked very well before the recession and they’d get a few jobs from a builder and get very well paid. So if they work two days [a] week, it’d be enough. Lately one of the guys worked a bank holiday Monday and he said to me, “I never worked a Monday in my life, not to mention a bank holiday!” That will tell you how bad it’s gone. But that’s how they fund it, they’re milking a system and these people are all on rent allowance and so on. Those that have kids, I can’t say I ever see the kids suffer financially. I don’t know how they fund things like that—Christmas comes and is sorted, and so are communions and confirmations. I don’t know whether they borrow money but you don’t see them skint very often. Lately a bit, perhaps, but I hadn’t seen it for years.’
John’s approach stayed with me. As an ex-drinker you’re constantly having to stop yourself assuming the moral high ground and judging. You forget sometimes how ridiculous the plight of the problem drinker is and the lack of control and awareness a serial drinker has. Sometimes I drive past bars where daytime drinkers are congregated and want to open the window and call them all fucking losers. Fuck them and the added strain on the health system. Fuck them and the chips on their shoulders. Fuck them and their stories of being passed over for jobs or screwed by ex-wives. Fuck them and their farts, their stale breath, their yellow teeth. Fuck them.
I get angry, not because of them (although you’d hardly know it!), but because I wasted so much of my own existence, of my life, thinking there was some benefit from sitting on a high stool for large chunks of the day and theorising. You forget the hold drink can have over someone, how utterly powerless an addict can be over the forces of alcohol.
You forget about the reality you construct for yourself, about the skewed thinking and the insane list of priorities. Even monetary values are broken down into units—€50 was 10 pints, or the bones of a session. Anything less and you needed a Plan B, a backup.
I got money from everywhere, from overdrafts to credit cards, from term loans to bounced cheques. Without a bank account thanks to credit problems, I would cash cheques wherever I could, from local shops to pawn merchants. Christmas and birthday presents often found their way into pawn shops—anything to keep the session going.
It’s an insane way of living, a hand-to-glass-to-mouth existence, and you sometimes forget about the logistics of daytime drinking and what a full-time occupation it is.
By 3.30 p.m. only one of the regulars was left, nodding off (his first sleep in 24 hours), in the corner of the bar. Tickets for the annual Christmas Lotto were flying all afternoon as the majority of the early-morning regulars made their way home for a few hours’ rest. Some headed to an off-licence for a naggin to help them through the rest of the day. The drinker’s smell, a mix of tobacco and old jumpers, left the bar for the first time.
I got a chance to talk with the owner who has been working here for 27 years. The crackdown on drink-driving has significantly impacted on the older locals moving from village to village and having a few drinks on their way, he told me. The younger people are now only into ‘quick’ ones, and are often only seen when he has a function in the bar. ‘They’re into the shots and so on, although I have a more settled crowd here. You see it going on at parties and that and they tend to get oblivious to what’s going on around them. It’s mostly eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds and their drink of choice has become spirits. When I was younger, and it’s not all that long ago, you’d like a pint and rarely touched spirits.’
I like the owner—he has his own health problems, which he has tackled head on with an overhaul of his diet and a positive outlook. Anecdotally, locals had told me of the manner in which he looks after his problem drinkers—of him going the extra mile to make sure they paid their rent or didn’t drink every penny they had. I noticed myself that he was careful not to give some of the regulars spirits and made sure they didn’t do anything foolish and get too out of hand. There was healthy respect among the regulars towards him and I got the feeling it went both ways, and not in a superficial, ‘I’ll take every penny you have and pretend to be your friend’ kind of way.
I was interested to get his take on the difference between the problem drinker and the regular one.
‘That’s a hard question to answer. Every pub has a few regulars. You would have the lad in here, as you saw, on a Monday all day and he is probably a problem drinker. My definition of a problem would be when they don’t go to work and things like that.
‘Some of the lads might be on the dole and waiting for the cheque on Thursday so they can be in here.
‘A lot of the lads are separated and they have problems. In terms of the money they might have nixers on the side and things like that. I wouldn’t have too many problem drinkers, I would say, I have a few heavy drinkers and you’d ask yourself are they alcoholics too? They probably are. I notice, too, that girls are drinking much more now. They would now go for drinks on the top shelf and things like that.’
I couldn’t help feeling, though, that the owner was complicit in the destructive lives of his daytime drinkers. He recognised some of them had problems, sure, but wasn’t he fuelling the issues in their lives by serving them alcohol every day? Wasn’t there a conflict there?
‘I find that hard,’ he said, ‘but I suppose I am a kind of a counsellor here as well. That’s especially true in a small village, where you know too much of what’s . . . going on. Part of my job is listening a lot and you have to try and help. Of course, I am aware of what is happening and it can be a conflict sometimes, but that’s the nature of the job.’
When asked why he thinks some people drink more than others, the owner said a lot of it, in his opinion, is down to loneliness. Although the nature of conversation in the pubs is changing, he says, and the community aspect of the bar is being eroded.
‘The culture of drinking has changed an awful lot [in] the last few years. The pub is still the focal point of many communities and for many individuals—you still have the banter and the craic, just not as much, and you don’t get the groups of people coming in. That’s what I like about the pubs, you know what’s going on, both good and bad, and it’s all discussed in the pub. A lot of the time it goes in one ear and out the other—you can’t be listening to everything!’
The owner said he looked forward to the day when he could bring his own son or daughter into the bar for the first drink—already, he said, they would have a glass at Christmas. ‘Eighteen or nineteen is the right age for a drink in a bar; I’m not into the idea of kids drinking in a pub at fourteen, fifteen or sixteen.’
One thing he says he has noticed in the past decade is that many of his regulars will now drink at home, something that was unheard of in previous times.
‘Growing up, we never had drink in the house. I only see it here in that there is a bottle bank right across the road and I see people dumping stuff there. It has increased steadily in recent years and probably accelerated when the smoking ban came in. That kick-started it. For anyone who smoked it was a big culture shock. I know one person in particular who hasn’t come into a pub since. He’s not local here, but will only go into a pub if there is an occasion, such as an anniversary or that, now.’
We continued to chat about changing traditions. The owner pointed to the fact that a neighbouring village had 20 bars at one point and is left with four now.
‘I think the pub will always be there in rural Ireland,’ he said, ‘but the numbers are declining and I can see a lot more closing. Pubs in the real country areas on their own find it very hard. The Guards are closing in on them and locals have to go to a place where they can get a lift home or villages where they can walk.’
Not one to stand still, the bar has started to do food this year in an effort to broaden out their daytime trade. ‘You have to move on with the times, definitely, and food really is a must if you’re going to keep the people, even for a funeral or anything like that. You feel that if you don’t [there’s] a danger that the local trade could be lost because they’ll go somewhere else. In Ireland our culture is very much pub orientated and I enjoy it. Having said that, you don’t get the big functions like you used to get years ago. Think about christenings, for instance, and only a small minority now come in and have a function.’
The demographic of the daytime drinkers in the bar was very much bachelor and Irish, with few women and fewer still foreign nationals. I remarked to the owner that it seemed out of step with the changing culture outside, of the new multiethnic Ireland which has emerged. He then told me a story that happened a few months earlier.
‘I had an experience with a guy who had a room rented upstairs. He was training to be a doctor and was from eastern Europe. He worked as a stable lad for a trainer over the road. A very nice fellow, and he told me his story and showed me pictures of his wife and his child. He was still far off becoming qualified as a doctor but he ran short of money and he wanted to spend three years here to make enough money to build his house and finish college. So he was on his second year here and he went home for Christmas and his wife was to come back with him and the child. He was at home for a month when he came back. I think his wife wouldn’t come back—she wanted him to come home but he knew another year or two would see him through. So he had money saved up and he started drinking a lot, bottles of vodka and so on. Maybe he was depressed at being up there without his family.
He was a very nice chap, a young lad, maybe twenty-seven or twenty-eight. You wouldn’t get foreigners in here that often. Him and a friend would come in and play pool and so on and have a few beers. But they started drinking heavy upstairs and you’d see him drinking bottles and carrying empty ones over to the bottle bank. It was beer and spirits mostly they drank. The only big spirit-drinkers we would have were after funerals or something, when fellas would have a few shots. But this lad just got into a routine of drinking and was buying it locally in shopping centres. He went on for months, and one day, he just fell down up there and died. He actually died there. He drank himself to death. We put a few quid together to get his body home.’
I found the story quite shocking. When I first visited the bar, weeks earlier, one of the regulars had died the weekend before and there was a post-wake of sorts happening. The man who died had cancer, I think, and other health complications. Every week the bar owner would take him out of hospital and bring him down to the bar for a drink. He had gone from being a solid drinker to barely being able to hold two pints towards the end. It was my first introduction to the bar—locals talking with fond memories of this man who drank with them, who worried with them and who, by his presence, allowed them to continue their lives beside the counter. And now he was dead and no one was making a link between the unhealthy lifestyle of the daytime drinker and his premature death.
To be honest, I found the whole scene quite depressing. Not that it is in any way unique—bars all over Ireland have similar scenarios, and I guess at least with the bar I visited there was a conscience at work behind the taps.
That evening the owner’s wife invited me for dinner. We sat down for a chat in the living room of their large home, on a gated site across the road from the bar. Try as I could to suppress the thoughts, I was struck by the probable dichotomy between the landlord’s home and that of some of his customers. Many of them, I imagined, slept in weeks-old sheets, tin-can-boiled eggs the extent of their culinary exploits. In contrast, the owner’s home was well kept, family orientated, spacious and comfy. Not that it was his fault that he had done all right over the years. He doesn’t have the problem. But the thought struck me that drink provided him with a nice family home and environment, whereas for many of his customers, it broke up what families and homes they had.
His wife told me she had worked in an office until her husband’s illness forced her to take a career break. Now she does the morning shift in the bar, dispensing the morning dosage to sickly patients. She brought an outsider’s eye to the daytime trade and her preconceived ideas on the type of people who drink during the day had changed dramatically since taking over the morning shift.
‘I worked in a bar years ago, before I ever got married, but only started working back behind the counter a while ago. It’s only now I’m getting used to the daytime crowd. Before, I would . . . only have worked when we were really busy and it was nighttime and you’re hardly talking to people, just throwing out the drink to customers. I used to hate the idea of daytime work. But now that I have been in there I got to know the people and actually I enjoy it. I really enjoy their company. Some of them are very witty and I guess I take a different view of it now.’
Reflecting on Irish culture, we got chatting about the extent to which a problem drinker can be assimilated into Irish society before being found out. Or, if he has been found out, he is carried along by the crowd and it’s not seen as a big problem. ‘It’s looked on as an acceptable thing to get pissed in Ireland and nobody really is going to say anything to you. People talk about it and say things like “I got hammered last night on twenty pints” very openly. On Mondays, you see the guys coming in and talking about their weekend and they don’t see it as a problem. In rural Ireland, what do you do if you’re not going to the pub drinking?
‘I think, especially, men living alone use the pub for company. What other social outlet do they have? If they’re men of a certain age, and they’re not into sport or gone beyond it and don’t have a partner, where are they going to go to meet people? There aren’t very many places. Most of our clientele have no other outlets, I would say. If you are a farmer, for example, and don’t have a workplace, or you might be working with one other guy or driving a digger all day, what are you going to do for a social outlet, to meet people?’
That idea of community, which the owner had remarked on earlier, is something fast disappearing in rural Ireland. From declining corner shops to voluntary sports, the individualisation of Irish society is fuelling changing social trends. Perhaps this is why the problem drinker is now more noticeable and a lot less camouflaged by the rest of drinking society. During the Celtic Tiger years especially, not as many people were into hanging about bars all day long when there was a few handy bob to be made. Others were determined to have their Chardonnay on their own decking, no matter how cold it got. They had new kitchens and stereo units to show off, in houses which they were paying through the teeth for.
‘One guy who lived in the village, and was in his thirties, used to come out four or five nights a week. The Guards had been putting people off the road all week and I think maybe three people had been stopped at one point. It was a Tuesday night, one of the quietest I ever put down, and there was one guy in the lounge and one in the bar. This local said, “For Christ’ sake, I come out to meet people, this is my social outing!” He likes a few drinks but mainly he comes out to meet people. But the other side of that, of course, is that it can be a problem when that becomes a way of life and you are used to meeting people every night.
‘For some people, they might have three drinks and come in to meet the lads. The core group of drinkers are like a mini-family—they don’t have any other person to talk to besides themselves. Sometimes the conversation is quite superficial; they’re having a laugh or the craic and chatting about their day and that. They’re quite connected in a way and there is a friendship there. They would look out for each other. I only see that now and I wouldn’t have seen that before I was working. Nighttime drinking is different because couples are out and so on. Any of the daytime guys around at night would be chatting to lots of different people around them and it’s a different conversation at nighttimes. The type of person who becomes a problem drinker is hard to classify—I think a lot of the time these people are lacking in self-confidence and it’s a crutch rather than enjoyment—it’s something they actually need. They need to have about four or five drinks before they’re even comfortable in a social situation. That’s not the case with everybody but with some of them. I do think a lot of them are very timid at the back of it. They can’t actually function socially without the drink.’
I ask the same question I asked the owner—does she feel she is conflicted and fuelling the problems of many of her regulars by supplying them with alcohol?
‘There is a conflict there, to be honest with you. My husband would look after a lot of guys. He would cut down on the spirits they were drinking or make sure they get home all right or whatever. But, say the guy we don’t serve spirits to, he goes in and gets them in town and then he comes back to us at certain times of the day. People are going to get drink if they want to, no matter where. But you do sometimes feel like saying stuff. Like when guys are telling you their problems. One guy suffers from mental health issues, and you nearly feel like saying, “Can you not see it’s the drink?” That’s not my job, in a way. My job is to listen to them and they don’t want me to tell them that. I can opt out. You can kind of bring up the subject. There was a lady who used to drink in there all day Monday. Her child was in the house having come back from school and would often beg the mother to come home. I used to say to my husband, “How can you stick it?” Having the child in the bar pleading for the mother to come home and she wouldn’t budge. As it happens, now she drinks at home all the time. So people will do that regardless. There was another guy who used to come into us and he had quite a drink problem. He was a young married guy. His wife eventually rang the Guards and he was warned not to be around drinking and driving. He just moved on to another village. The sad part of that is that the Guards would have said he was violent to her when he went home and we never would have seen that side of him in the pub. He moved on to another place and didn’t solve his problems.
‘I remember another guy and his wife rang my husband and said, “Would you do me a favour and just bar him for one month?” He said, “I will.” So when he came in as usual my husband said, “Sorry you’re barred for one month.” He said “Fair enough,” and after the month, the wife was my husband’s best friend. She said she didn’t know where he was or how he was coming home. He still drank, so there’s a way of being with people and of handling situations. I would have been quite removed from that when I was working in the office; now I can see the whole story and you do get attached to people. There are very few coming in that I do not like. Most of the people you’d love if they’d sort out their problems, but they’re not going to solve them in the pub and I don’t think a publican is going to sort their problems either.’
One thing I noticed in my time at the bar was very few under-25s were drinking with the regulars or in their own groups. The normal rites of passage in a rural village, whereby youngsters would be brought into the bar in their late teens for a drink, seemed to be missing. What this meant in effect was that those youngsters in the village drinking were doing so away from adult supervision. Many had told me that drugs were now a feature of village life, and with cheaper drink available in off-licences and supermarkets, the current generation were turning their backs on a traditional night out. Back seats of Honda Civics had become their lounge bars.
‘We would have some people in their twenties come in,’ said the bar worker, ‘but they generally come out at weekends. They might come in for a few drinks and then go to town and go clubbing or whatever. The eighteen to twenty-one age group don’t come in, really. They are drinking but they don’t come in to us. They’re mainly doing drugs. There’s only one guy in the village that comes in for a pint from that age group and the rest of them are all doing drugs. They smoke weed and are buying drink in places like Lidl and drink in cars and do whatever drugs they’re doing. One of the guys, a father of one of them, was saying, “I wish they would come in because I’d know what they’re doing.”
‘When they do come in, it’s all shots and vodka. We notice on long weekends or nights of parties or big nights such as Stephen’s Night and that, when they do come in, they go through huge amounts of vodka. It used to be all those alcopops. The way I see them drinking is that they start off pretty okay. They might be having a bottle of Smirnoff Ice or WKD or Bulmers, and then it would come a certain time in the night and it’s shots. They would get through a serious amount. Just “One, Two, Three,” and go. They’d spend huge amounts. Vodka and Red Bull is the big thing at the end of the night.
‘To be honest, girls are more into the shots than the guys. The guys still actually drink pints but at the end of the night they will have a vodka and Red Bull. They might do a few shots but with girls the object of the game is to get as many shots as you can into you if they’re going clubbing or whatever. It’s a ridiculous way to drink and a lot of the time you pour more stuff down the sink after. What I see now, that I never saw before, is that people will say, “Can I have three vodkas and a Red Bull?” And you return with three glasses and they’ll say, “No, can I have a pint glass and throw in the three!” We would never have drank like that. Nobody would even have had a double! The pub experience is central to Irish life, though, and I would like to think it’s safe enough for another generation. We hope, anyway!’
——
Following my visits to the bar in Tipperary I was beginning to wonder if we were indeed moving towards a more café-orientated culture than we sometimes give ourselves credit for. It was clear that rural bars have changed significantly in Ireland and some are having to adapt and change with the times. So could another type of social experience take root here? What about a bar without beer, for instance? It would never work, would it? From the outside of the Carrig Rua Hotel in Dunfanaghy, County Donegal, everything seemed normal enough. The site is at the end of the once bustling fishing port, offering commanding views of the surrounding area, including Killahoey Strand, where a US Air Force Flying Fortress landed in 1943 after running out of fuel. Across the bay is Horn Head, a natural heritage area, offering the village protection from the worst of the Atlantic seas. The 23-bed hotel, which had been closed for a number of years, is now expanding in line with the majestic views around. Like many former fishing ports, the town was slow to adapt its business model from trawlers to tourists. While Dunfanaghy has always attracted a certain number of regional tourists, its proximity to Donegal Airport (40 kilometres away) is expected to see the town attract far more foreign visitors and re-ignite commercial activity in the area.
Against this background, Ann Sweeney took over the running of the Carrig Rua Hotel in 2008, having already owned and operated a successful restaurant, bar and shop in the town. Two days into her new venture, though, Gardaí raided the premises and removed all alcoholic stock. Delays in transferring the bar licence from the previous owners to the new management meant that the hotel had been operating without a bar licence since its opening. With 46 employees, mostly local, working at the hotel, and hefty weekly outgoings, things looked bleak for Ann and her staff. Surely a hotel without alcohol would be doomed to failure in a country where the average annual consumption of pure alcohol per person is 13.4 litres, well above the EU average. Or would it?
Ann Sweeney takes up the story: ‘We opened up the bar on the understanding that the licence was close to being transferred, and that turned out not to be the case at all.
‘On Monday 7 July, at 7.15 p.m., two sergeants and two big vans came and all our alcohol was confiscated from the premises. Many of the staff here had worked for me previously and after the raid I was sitting here thinking, “What am I going to do?”—some of these staff had given up jobs to come and work for me.’ After two days’ meditation, Ann says she came upon an idea. ‘I have a bar nearby, and following government legislation in relation to drink-driving and smoking, the rural pub trade has been decimated. So I thought, why not look at things another way and perhaps there is now a market for an entirely different experience.’
And so, on 17 July 2008 the Carrig Rua Hotel opened its doors as Ireland’s first alcohol-free hotel, inviting Kerry Councillor Michael Healy-Rae to do the honours. At the opening, he remarked that there was ‘much talk and little real action in Ireland in addressing the problem of alcohol abuse’. The Gardaí, he said, ‘have unwittingly provided an opportunity to demonstrate if we are mature enough to be comfortable with the idea of a hotel that provides good quality accommodation and food without having to have an endless supply of booze on tap for its patrons’.
So how does it all work out? Visiting last year, hotel staff were at pains to talk up the positives of working in a dry hotel. Raucous singsongs have been replaced with one-on-one life-coaching sessions, nature walks are being promoted and encouraged, and afternoon salsa classes are growing in numbers, even among staff.
In the bar itself, I found manager Stephen Ferry from Letterkenny training a new staff member on how to make the perfect skinny latte, while a newly installed Slush Puppie machine whirred away in one corner. Herbal teas have replaced high-end whiskeys and smoothies are the new shots. Several alcohol-free beers are on offer, as well as red, white and rosé wines. Ginger beer and homemade lemonade inhabit the fridges. For the non-drinker, it’s sort of like going back into the garden and giving Adam a proper heads-up before he bites into the apple. The only problem, though, is that it was 7.40 p.m. on a Tuesday night and the place was empty.
‘A pregnant lady was in earlier,’ said Mr Ferry. ‘She liked the fact that she could come into a bar where she didn’t feel under pressure to take a drink. She could sit here with her kids and not see people drinking or falling around the place.’ With homemade pastries dotted along the counter, the bar had now rebranded itself as a continental-style café, open from nine in the morning until 10 at night. Diners in the hotel restaurant were allowed to bring wine with them, albeit with a hefty €7.50 corkage fee per bottle. ‘The response so far has been very good,’ said Ferry. ‘Often when people go to a restaurant they are stuck with what [is] on the wine list, but here in this hotel they can bring their own. Of course, we do have some customers who come into the bar and ask for alcohol and there is a look of fright on their faces when I have to say we have none.’
As the evening progressed, locals began to wander into the bar area, attracted by well-known folk singer Roy Arbuckle from Derry, who set up on stage. One couple, Séamus and Betty McQuade, ordered a large pot of tea and sat near the door. Both were teetotallers, and had been coming to the area for over 30 years. ‘We never drank or smoked in our lives,’ says Séamus, ‘and it’s enjoyable to come in to a bar like this without the hassle of people knocking glasses against you and being rowdy and noisy. I’ve nothing against drink, but it can get out of hand. Even though people can bring wine in here, it’s not the same as people drinking spirits. That’s when things really get out of hand.’
The couple say it’s hard to get tea after 9 p.m. in most bars, so the Carrig Rua duly obliges. One local, with a foot in both camps, arrives with a bottle of wine in one hand and a bottle of Ballygowan in another. Others arrive in the bar after dinner, including Charlie and Kate Hill, finishing off their bottle of wine before switching to alcohol-free rosé for the rest of the evening. Once the band starts, the atmosphere is not unlike any other hotel bar, and whilst the staff are not run off their feet, they’re not exactly standing around either. By 10 p.m., the bar has filled up, and during a break, the singer Roy Arbuckle remarks that he could get used to playing to a sober crowd. ‘It’s not that unusual,’ he says. ‘The great folk tradition of the sixties in New York came out of coffee houses. I suppose in our culture we have grown up over generations thinking that pubs are patrons of the arts, such is the link between traditional music and drink. In terms of atmosphere, I prefer when it is sober—people are more inclined to be attentive to the music rather than drink and themselves.’
Next morning, Ann Sweeney breezed through the lobby, taking names for a music workshop she had organised for that afternoon. There are plans to open children’s playrooms and an old-style games room at the back of the hotel and at the time she was also considering hiring more staff; such has been the demand since opening.
‘It’s amazing, we will have five waiters in the bar today as well as a manager and they will be flat out doing coffees and latte and herbal teas all day,’ she says. ‘Our takings are roughly the same.’ She says she has taken enquiries from AA groups and alcohol treatment centres looking to book in. Three weeks in, and the hotel has yet to take out a single advert. The premises has proven especially popular with young families, who would not normally be allowed have their children on a licensed premises after 9 p.m., while the evolving range of events on offer in the bar helps keep everyone occupied.
She’s now not pushed on getting her licence back. If things continue to develop, she may not need it. ‘The ironic thing’, she says, en route to meet a lady about reiki classes, ‘is that over the bank holiday weekend, the café here in the hotel took in double what my licensed premises around the corner took in. So why change a successful business model?’ I thought I’d seen the future, folks, and it was looking fizzy.
Two months after my visit, during a local jazz festival, Ann Sweeney learned that her licence had been renewed. That same day she restocked her shelves—the very same day! I called her months later to get an update on how business was going and she informed me. I felt cheated. What about all the AA groups she said were booked in? All the families and non-drinkers delighted with the premises and a chance to socialise without alcohol? Alas, as soon as the authorities gave the official okay, Ireland’s first booze-free bar was no more. It hardly stood a chance. While Sweeney may now claim that the ‘bar is more of a café with the emphasis on food and music’, it is in essence no different to any other hotel bar in Ireland. So much for new beginnings.
‘We were faced with a dilemma when the licence returned. I still believe we would have been able to continue, but perhaps not in the off-season. Now that we have our licence back, next summer I don’t intend to take the alcohol out of the bar. It wouldn’t make economical sense,’ Sweeney said when we spoke. The publicity from being Ireland’s first booze-free bar, for a short time at least, will do the hotel no harm in the long run.
For non-drinkers, the revolution, it seems, will not be soberised.