Chapter 5
‘Now the summer is fine, but the winter’s a fridge
Wrapped up in old cardboard under Charing Cross Bridge
And I’ll never go home it’s because of the shame
Of a misfit’s reflection in a shop window pane.
So all you young people take an advice
Before crossing an ocean you’d better think twice
’Cause you can’t live without love, without love alone
Here’s the proof round the West End in the nobody zone.’
Missing You—JIMMY MACCARTHY
I first started thinking about Irish emigrants and their association with alcohol following a cup of coffee with RTÉ journalist and author Paddy O’Gorman. For the last 20 years, Paddy has been documenting the plight of Irish emigrants in England. With a mother from London and a father from Cobh, from where so many emigrated, Paddy’s observational eye has always been well in tune with the state of the ex-pat and how it can manifest itself adversely. Or, as he explains himself, ‘The pub is hugely important to the story of emigration.’ Paddy’s own father worked in London, all the while managing to sidestep stereotype. ‘My own dad never drank and I came to understand that’s why he married an Englishwoman, he married outside the culture of the other Irish men. He had a visible distaste for the heavy drinking culture and an aversion to it. He never had any time for what he called the “rubbish of pub talk”.’
Perhaps it was this personal remove that allowed Paddy to document the extent to which alcohol dominated the emigrant story. Issues of loneliness, of cultural inadequacy, of sentimentality and of a certain amount of personal freedom from being in another place all played their part in allowing addiction and abuse to run riot. I knew it from my own limited experience in the bars of Cape Cod, where hordes of Irish on J1 Visa programmes crammed as much drinking into a three-month stay as possible. Hey, I was one of them!
O’Gorman, though, doesn’t see emigration per se as the issue—more how we Irish act out during the transition to another environment. ‘The emigration thing in the 1980s was a hell of a lot better than being unemployed back home. Yeah, they were paying a fortune on their flats, same as we did in Rathmines in the 1970s. I think every male negative thing tends to be accentuated in the migrant worker. The Irish in Germany, in the 1990s, when the Berlin Wall came down, helped create a very ugly drinking scene. There was an awful lot of mad behaviour on drink and little villages with “No Irish” signs up. These German towns were not allowing Irish in pubs any more because of young men who behaved in an absolutely disgraceful fashion.’
In moral terms, though, not everything was black and white. ‘In the eyes of many, it was a double-edged sword. While drink may have been bad, it was nowhere near as bad as sex. Drink was nearly a kind of substitute for sexual joy. Associated with merrymaking, in Ireland the morose atmosphere of the male drinking group is different to many other countries. It’s an odd thing.’ While others in this book have come to see the strict moral rule of the Church as manifesting itself in an unhealthy reliance on alcohol, O’Gorman sees it slightly differently. ‘It might not be a popular thing to say but we would have sank without the church, and without its influence on men abroad. I am told stories about Fr Eamon Casey and his ability to go onto dance floors in Kilburn or Cricklewood and say, “Men, men, for God’s sake stop”. It would have an effect on guys mad with drink. These were men who would have ended up in prison and many of them did. People like Fr Casey had a huge positive effect on Irish culture abroad.’
The Irish abroad, like many emigrants, are lacking wider societal structure, however lax, to ensure drinking patterns don’t get out of control. For example, horizontal policing by peers, where older brothers or members of a family might tell individuals to go easy, is less apparent. ‘Ah sure, there is none of us married, we’re all separated, and that’s the work’ is a phrase often heard among emigrants, be it in Berlin or Boston. But, perhaps there is something in the nature of the men themselves that makes them become migrant workers. A feeling of being out of sync from an early age, of not quite fitting in. Add alcohol to those feelings, and you’re in for a whole lot of self-destructive behaviour.
‘It’s a sad life,’ says O’Gorman of the emigrant problem drinker. ‘I was working in London in 1978 with a lot of Irish guys. One day some of them were remarking that “Jack Doyle has died.” I’d never hear of Jack Doyle, even though he was from Cobh. I rang my dad and he said he was an awful man who used to steal our chickens as kids!
‘My dad went on to say he was a terrible drinker. And over the last twenty years, I met all these old guys who said, “Ah sure I had a drink with Jack Doyle.” I thought, “They can’t all be telling the truth.” But at this stage of my life I actually think they really did all drink with him. In the later stages he would pour his life out for a drink. There is nothing romantic [or] glorious about it and there were many Jack Doyles in bars all over London.’
Prof. Brian Girvin, Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Glasgow and a noted historian, describes arriving in London in the 1970s and seeing police vans lined up in the street to deal with public order offences at closing time. ‘That was my direct experience of the Irish emigrants and alcohol, with fights left and right of me! Historically, I think the evidence we have from the 1940s and 1950s shows the amount of money the Irish emigrants were spending on alcohol.’
Probed on whether he felt the colonial legacy was to blame for Ireland’s reliance on alcohol, Prof. Girvin reserved judgment. ‘I’m always slightly reserved when the colonial thing is put forward to explain all the negatives and none of the positives of the Irish experience. I think a lot of peasant societies drink heavily. One of the things about emigrants arriving in Britain was that it was a much freer society compared to Ireland. I think that people from rural backgrounds arriving there must have found it quite challenging. An awful lot of single males fell between the cracks, with no sister or mother to look after them. The Church was really the only focus for many of them. And the Church was never overly anti-drink. Many of these males were displaced with more money than they were used to and more freedom and many lost control as a result. I’m inclined to think when the Irish left Ireland, as other communities have done, they took a public aspect of their culture with them. Italians took the restaurant, the Irish took the pub.’
More recently, a study carried out by Dr Mary Tilki, Principal Lecturer in MA Health and Social Care at Middlesex University, examined the social contexts of drinking among Irish men in London. Mainly focused on men who left Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s, the study explored the ‘possibility that tolerant attitudes to alcohol in Ireland persist on migration to Britain and are then confounded by a culture of binge drinking among young people in general’. One of the sources for the study was the 1999 Health Survey for England, which included first- and second-generation Irish for the first time and found they were more likely to consume alcohol to excess than other ethnic groups and the general population. For the last three decades, in fact, repeated studies have pointed to higher alcohol-related mortality rates in England and Wales among Irish-born people than among other ethnic groups. Others point to higher rates of suicide, admission to psychiatric hospitals and general medical complaints among the Irish in Britain.
The men who left Ireland from the 1950s for the UK were mainly employed by building contractors on a casual basis and the Irish pub was central to their economy. It’s where many were picked up, dropped off and often paid their wages for a day’s work. It was, in many ways, a ‘home from home’. Society in Ireland at the time was a strange mix of teetotalism and alcohol abuse. Alcohol was at once embraced and condemned, as it still is. The focus on abstention, though, in previous decades, with children being required to ‘take the pledge’ at Confirmation time, meant that many young Irish adults never had the opportunity to learn how to drink sensibly or in an ordered manner. Alcoholism operating within that culture, then, was often regarded as a ‘good man’s fault’ as opposed to a disease or illness which needed treatment or any concerted therapeutic action.
As Dr Tilki points out, ‘Although the pub had an important economic function for Irish men in Britain, its wider social functions cannot be underestimated. It afforded an escape from overcrowded and inhospitable digs, shared with strangers and where visitors were not allowed.’ Discrimination against the Irish, particularly during the period of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, meant the pub offered a safe haven from societal hostility. The pub also served as a rite of passage for many young men, just off the boat and drinking and working with adults for the first time. Men who were admired and respected in the Irish enclaves had names like Mule Kennedy, Bull Gallagher, Big Mick or Elephant John, with stories of their drinking exploits continuing to the present.
The public drinking place has, as Dr Tilki notes, a ‘key function in facilitating sociability and alcohol promotes relaxation and conviviality. In most cultures, rules around drinking stipulate that alcohol is consumed in a sharing social context with goodwill and bonhomie.’ What the pub did was allow Irish men from different parts of Ireland and many working under different employers to socialise with friends and build up their list of contacts. This was particularly evident with men from Gaeltacht areas who had limited English. ‘In addition to the alcohol, music, cards and games whiled away the hours for Irish men, with no “home” to go to, kept them in touch with their culture, and protected them from homesickness, loneliness and isolation.’
Dr Tilki’s report offered a bleak assessment of the plight of the Irish in Britain, unless urgent action is not taken. ‘Given the unequivocal poor physical and mental health, high levels of suicide and concerns about dangerous patterns of consumption among Irish men (and women) in Britain, urgent action is needed at national and local policy level,’ she noted.
I travelled to Cricklewood, hoping to meet what is left of the Irish emigrant drinking culture. Leaving the Willesden Green Tube station and walking towards Cricklewood Broadway, the Irishness of this part of London has become somewhat muted. Polish, Latvian, Greek, Pakistani and Indian faces now populate the Broadway, and even some of the Irish bars have Polish signs outside advertising drinks promotions. Many of the Irish in this area left to chase the Tiger in the noughties and haven’t returned. Those who made their mark left the area, finding in areas such as Surrey and Richmond a more salubrious neighbourhood. Houses in the area still have a rented feel, though, with glass bottles outside doorways and unkempt lawns a feature. First port of call was the recently opened Cricklewood Homeless Centre, run by Danny Maher, which is dealing with the many aging Irish with alcohol and other problems.
The new building opened in 2008, with financial assistance, somewhat ironically, from Irish building contractors. The charity itself has been in operation since 1983, when locals noticed a rise in the number of Irish on the streets following the building crash of the 1980s. ‘You might know the story, most of our lads lived in one room, worked on the buildings and the rest of the lads were in the pub. When the working lads got off the sites, they went straight to the pub and drank most nights. They went home then to their little room, and when they lost their job, they lost everything. So that’s the reason they set up a soup kitchen in a local church from 1983 up to the present.’
Over time the centre changed from a soup kitchen for the homeless to what is now a community centre assisting vulnerable persons in a wide variety of circumstances from mental health issues to addiction, housing and job assistance. ‘Most of the work is still around homelessness,’ says Danny Maher. ‘Irish are the second biggest group—the first largest ethnic grouping we deal with being African refugees. A major trend these days is for us to be working with many from Eastern Europe, mainly Polish. We call them the new Irish, they are very similar backgrounds in ways, Catholic countries with major drink problems.’
The centre is built to reflect Maslow’s triangle of needs, with the clients taking a journey from the ground floor to the top, where they will leave with a capacity to look after themselves. ‘There are Irish people here who have problems going back thirty years,’ says Danny Maher. ‘So their journey will take a long time and it’s doubtful they will ever fully reach their destination. Our plan for them is to improve their lifestyles. Young fellas will come in, though, and we would have more hope. There is a young Irish fella now from Limerick, came in a few weeks ago and he is homeless and young. So we will be looking to get him back into work and accommodation as soon as possible so he doesn’t fall into the lifestyle.’
From the Diarmuid-Gavin-designed gardens to the it suites and medical facilities, the building caters for those marginalised either by society or their own habits in a state-of-the-art environment. When I ask Danny why it is that alcohol plays such a role in the lives of Irish emigrants, he points to loneliness and loss as major factors. ‘I came over here myself thirty years ago as a young fella and didn’t have any family here so I have some understanding of what it is like. Fellas came over here at fourteen and fifteen and went straight onto the building site and they only had the pub. I think they got into bad habits at a very early stage. I suppose this country and their employers exploited them as well. When they think about Ireland now, everything is loss. For example the Galtymore is gone, a major dance hall and icon of Irish community. The National Dance Hall in Kilburn, major meeting point for the Irish, is gone. These streets, up to two years ago, [you] wouldn’t have been able to walk along the footpaths with the amount of Irish men waiting for the pickup for buildings. That has been going on for twenty to thirty years. Now not one of them, the demographic has changed. The Irish emigrants are losing everything.’
——
On the third floor, where hourly therapy sessions and meetings take place, I met with Gerry, a 47-year-old former labourer from Mayo, who first came to the UK in 1978. He was 16½ years old at the time, and got work on the building sites.
Most of his family were in London, and him being the youngest, it was inevitable he would follow suit. Before he came to London he experimented with alcohol only a handful of times. But things quickly changed. He’s now sober six months, the longest period in his adult life without drinking.
‘The carryon was lunchtime, around one o’clock, everyone go to the pub and have a couple of pints, especially in hot weather. The safety regulation that time was more common sense, not the type of regulations you have today. So everyone, even the foreman, would go for a couple of pints at lunchtime, depending on whatever you get in over half an hour. Some people might have four or five pints, especially if it’s a day of ninety degrees. Some might only have two.
‘If you were travelling out of town, you’d go straight to the pub after work. And again, some people might only have three or four pints or some would stay until closing time.
‘For me, it progressed as the years went on until the point where drink takes hold. For the last few years, drink was virtually my god. I got so dependent on it.
‘You’d never be out of work, really. You had the contacts if you were here for years and would get to know nearly every Irish person. Sometimes you’d get sick of work and go on a binge, maybe for two weeks. The binge would last until the money would last. You end up starting from scratch again, a vicious circle.
‘I was living around the area. The pubs them days, in the nineteen-eighties up until the late nineteen-nineties, when the work was good and the money was there, were great. On a Monday night in a pub, the place would be packed after the weekend. In for the cure and for some people the cure would lead to the session again. If you had too much Monday, you had to go another night and then the weekend would be nearly on top of you and it would be the full blast again.
‘Some jobs would be only five days. So you would get up Saturday morning and have a shower or bath and you’d be bored. So the first thing you’d do is go to the pub and your mates would be in there. Even if me working mates weren’t there, there would be someone there you would know, because you’re around the area for so long, it’s like a big, big family. Even in Kilburn you’d know people, no matter which pub you’d go to.
‘I never really sat down and thought about the drink. You start to realise you have a problem when you start missing time over work. That’s the first sign, I think. Missing Monday started first. In them days in Biddy Mulligan’s in Kilburn you’d get more in it Monday that you would get in it Saturday or Sunday night. The pubs used to close at half two or three o’clock in the afternoon but Biddy Mulligan’s would stay open. If you were in, you were locked in. So if you did the full monty on Monday, you’d end up missing Tuesday, and if you missed Tuesday you’d have a full week in it. It would creep up on you gradually. Eventually over the years.
‘In my heyday I could drink fifteen, sixteen or seventeen pints. I remember a cousin of mine said to me one night years ago, do you know how many pints you drank? He didn’t drink and kept count. He said I drank eighteen. I was twenty-one at the time.
‘I tried to stop. God only knows how many times I tried. Locked myself away in the room for three or four days in torture. The minute I hit outside again the temptation was too easy and straight at it again. I drank everything and anything. In the morning it would be a few pints of cider to cure myself. It’s easily drank. Maybe a few brandy and ports. You’d go by what you’d hear what the best thing for the cure was. Which is nonsense; the best cure in the long run is no cure. You’d try anything. If you drink a few of them anything would cure you. I decided to return to Dublin at the end of the nineteen-nineties to help me slow down the drinking. I knew it was getting the better of me so I thought a change of scenery, a change of faces would help. But it didn’t. It was the same carryon in Dublin.
‘No matter where you are, if you’re out in the Sahara Desert you’ll get it if you are that desperate for it. It had a grip got on me very badly. The last few years in Dublin I used to get up an hour earlier in the morning. I had to leave the house at six-thirty a.m. for work so I’d get up at five-thirty a.m. to have a few cans to settle my stomach to go to work. I knew then I really had a problem. But I needed that hour of drinking to stop the shakes in the morning, to stop the dry retching, the vomiting. I’d have maybe two, three, four cans. Then I’d be sound and head off to work.
‘That would keep me going until breakfast time, ten o’clock, when I’d go to the off-licence instead of the café. I’d have my other top-up then, which would keep me going until lunchtime. Two or three pints then. Maybe four pints. I was living on drink. Come in then in the evening I’d go to the pub. For a couple of years I was living on takeaways at eleven o’clock at night—that was the only bit of food I had.
‘Down through the years I was in a few relationships, but I was married to drink already, put it bluntly. One relationship I was in for four years and she was a good woman. She eventually said to me, “Me or the drink”. It was like being hit with a fourteen-pound hammer. Without hesitating I said to her, “I can’t give it up.” That was the end of that relationship after four years. There was no competition between her and the drink. I did love her but there you go.
‘I don’t think a dependence on the drink is down to your family. My father always had a few pints, he still does to this day and he’s nearly ninety years of age. I started at an early age and the work situation I was in, it was all drinking. But then I had a choice. I know people who had their few drinks and didn’t make a pig of themselves. I realise now it creeps up without you knowing it. At the time you don’t realise you’re doing damage to yourself.
‘In 2000, I went back to Ireland, and it was the same. I knew a few fellas from here and started using a pub all the time. You get to know people in the pub and unfortunately there are people there that have the same problem you have. You click with them people. You won’t click with the person that’s only in for one or two pints.
‘I was ten years away from Cricklewood, and when I came back last year a lot had changed. Lot of faces missing. I heard a lot of them died and a few of them moved to Ireland when work was good. A few of the old faces are still around.
‘The two main ballrooms had closed. I mean in the 1980s many a time we left one of the ballrooms, The Galtymore, at two in the morning and get a taxi to a twenty-four-hour shop and fill the boot with drink. Then up to some flat and keep drinking until you fell asleep. Wake up in the morning and, anything left over, cure yourself and off to the pub again. I know for a fact there’s fellas doing the same thing I started doing with them in the early eighties.
‘I knew, though, I was at the end of my road. I hadn’t been eating properly for years. I used to be average fifteen stone in my heyday and the weight fell off me. Which it would fall off anyone when you have cider for six o’clock in the morning and cider for ten o’clock in the morning. I was down to eleven stone when I went into detox.
‘I was weak. Only for the detox and the medication and all that, it helped me a lot. It helped the horrors, the shakes. I was on ten tablets a day for two weeks to help keep the rats away. It was my last call out for help. This centre here, only for it. I came out and they put me into a fine house where all the people in the house are absent from drink. We’re having therapy now five days a week. My family at home know I’m not drinking, but I haven’t really gone into detail with what I’ve done to stop. It’s not a thing you like to advertise, that you were in drying out.
‘When I was growing up there wasn’t such thing as an “alcoholic”, there was such a thing as a “heavy drinker”. Or “he likes his drink”. There was no such thing that time as “he had a problem with drink”.
‘I wouldn’t be able to settle back in Ireland now because I’m too far gone. A year and a half before I came back to England, I was in Mayo because through drink I had four or five broken ribs. Then I broke my shoulder through drink so I went home for a bit.
‘There’s a local pub there over the road and you see married couples in their early fifties and they come into the pub at eleven o’clock at night and I can’t understand that.
‘I would be pie-eyed that time, only ready to fall into bed. They would come out for an hour, maybe, which I would never be able to do. Not if I lived for a hundred years. They go out at eleven o’clock at night, I go out at eleven o’clock in the morning. That’s the difference.
‘For example, down through the years I often found myself in early houses. I remember one job in particular where the early house was between the Tube station and the job site, which was a disaster. You’d get off the Tube and have to pass the pub. If I felt rough at all I’d go in and have one, maybe two quick ones. A couple of mornings I’d go in and there would be someone from the job in the pub before me!
‘This is the longest now I have been off it. If you had told me this time last year I would be six months off it I’d say you were crazy. The first few months were hard, I was still nervous. Even after a month off it if some car hooted a horn, I would jump. My nervous system was completely destroyed by thirty years drinking. I was spitting up blood in the end and my liver was not too good. If I kept going I wouldn’t have seen fifty, in other words.
‘It’s hard to say but it’s the truth. As time goes by things are getting better.
‘My main objective is to stay off the drink. It’s a cliché, but I’m taking it one day at a time.’
——
The Shannon was one of the bars Paddy O’Gorman mentioned where I might still find Irish daytime drinkers. When I got there, just after lunch, I counted maybe 10–15 Irish guys drinking at the bar. In clichéd fashion, the Pogues were on the sound system. Men hunched over the bar drinking lager with whiskey chasers, popping out every few minutes to check betting slips or smoke. We met a man called John Derry who seemed to know the lie of the land in Cricklewood. With him was a smaller man with a lined faced who spoke with an English accent but, from what I gathered, was of Irish descent. John didn’t want to speak on tape initially, asking that we first chat among ourselves about the scene in Cricklewood and the Irish drinking habits. He kept referring to the others at the bar as ‘serious drinkers’, not placing himself in that category by virtue of the fact that he worked from time to time. The supposed hierarchy among daytime drinkers never ceased to amaze me!
Off tape, John told me about close relations dying due to alcohol, about how much the area had changed, and about how little those who remained had in common with the Ireland that has emerged in their absence. It was a depressing scene, almost uniquely male and aged 50+. Later, three young Irish guys in workers’ clothes called in, having finished something of a day’s work. They downed shots and pints in equal measure—Red Bull and vodka followed by pints of Carling. A few of them clashed with one of the older lads in the bar and I couldn’t help but feel that neither generation had learned much from the other.
Many of the Irish guys I spoke to complained about a new wave of Eastern European workers, who were now lining the Broadway each morning hoping for the pickup. There was a latent racism and wide stereotyping in many comments, and this from a class of Irish who faced English hostility when they first came to London in the 1960s and 1970s. How quickly we forget. Several others were invited to join our conversation but refused to speak on tape and demanded it be turned off, somewhat obsessively. It was as if they wanted to still be in conflict mode, to still have to watch their step and to mistrust everyone new to the group.
One told me, ‘We’re all right when you get to know us, but we’re a very shy people. Myself, I was in prison for a couple of years because of my beliefs. It doesn’t matter really at the end of the day what area you’re in, you got to get away from certain influences.’ It came to a discussion about the Irish homeless. One of the guys at the table took exception. ‘Now, hang on, there ain’t no Paddies sleeping on the streets here. Fuck Off. We have a homeless centre for them. We look after our own.’
But I saw several older Irish hanging around the Tube station or sitting in shop doorways with their hands out. Pride keeps some of them from seeking assistance. Some of the guy won’t even ask for a cup of tea in the Homeless Centre because of pride. One of the men we met told me about his brother, who ended up on the streets following a failed relationship. Everyone tried to help him; in the end, though, he wanted out. Others in the bar bought him drink, even though they were asked not to. ‘What else could we do?’ they asked. ‘If someone don’t want help, they don’t want help.’
The men told me about bars in the area open at 6 o’clock in the morning where the cleaners served the drink to customers. They told me about the ballrooms, where ‘a lot of mismatches took place!’, and volunteered how in their prime they had no trouble with women. ‘We can still turn on the charm if we want to,’ said one, through cigarette stench and shaking hand.
It was difficult to talk as the tape recorder was making other customers paranoid. I got the feeling many here had been ‘active’ during the Troubles and were wary of having their names recorded. One of the homeless staff told me afterwards that during the 1980s, informers used to sit in on Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in the area in order to get information.
John offered up some insights: ‘We’re like fish out of water, away from your own country and come over here for a bit of work. Things maybe haven’t worked out for some properly. The older people living in bedsits have no real quality of life, paying from eighty pounds a week up, living on top of each other. It’s not like back home, where people live in proper accommodation and stuff. I think it is more close knit back in Ireland as well. People don’t give a shite over here. If someone dies here, it’s “such-and-such-died” and next day carry on as normal. People back home would be more concerned. I think it has all to do with family and caring in the community. They pull together back home. A big factor is the Eastern Europeans undercutting workers. A Polish man will work for maybe twenty to thirty pounds a day. Lot of people in there on the dole and might get a wee bit of work here and there. Everybody bonds with each other and looks after each other. I think people are nowhere as bad in drinking in Ireland to what it is over here. They say the Irish drink more away and I’d agree with that.’
John’s friend, the ex-Irish with a strong English accent, interrupted by outlining the place the pub held in emigrant culture: ‘All the environment around us since we came here has been pub orientated. If you wanted something you had to go to the pub to get it. They cashed our cheques and took some money off us. They organised accommodation. Everything was the pub. Still is and all.’
Around the corner from Cricklewood Broadway, I noticed labyrinths of bedsits and multi-occupancy houses, where the last generation of forgotten Irish emigrants live out their days before dying, mostly prematurely. I was brought to meet Séamus, a 55-year-old former tradesman, also from Mayo, who has lived for 12 years in one room. The year previous I had been in Africa reporting on developing world stories several times, hearing about appalling human rights abuses in displaced camps in eastern Congo, documenting the aftermath of post-election violence in Kenya and the effects of climate change on the families living along the Zambezi River in Mozambique. Nothing, though, had prepared me for the shock of seeing a fellow Irishman, in 2009, in central London, living in the most deplorable and squalid conditions. In truth, it was heartbreaking, shocking, and I was totally unprepared for the deep impression it left. Perhaps because this is what full-term alcoholism looks like. His room contained his worldly possessions—among them two battered and stained radios, a TV and DVD player, two tennis rackets, some videos, books, a ragged duvet, a stepladder, one chest of drawers, a poster shrine to Celtic Football Club, Kerry footballer Colm ‘The Gooch’ Cooper and ABBA. Empty cans, cheap brandy bottles, drained naggins, flagons of cider and bottles of wine littered the floor, as well as ash, cigarette ends, leftover Cup-a-Soups, empty pots, a ready made meal and a book of Joseph Conrad short stories. For every Shane MacGowan, there are a hundred Séamuses, albeit without hefty royalty payments or a blindly supporting public to fall back on.
Séamus wore a pair of black cords one size too small, blackened white socks and a v-neck diamond-patterned jumper pulled over his gaunt frame. He’d had a hard night, little sleep. In the previous two years his three best buddies had all died, all living in the rooms next to and above his. Drink took them all, and now Séamus was even more isolated, rarely leaving his room because of the embarrassment of been seen drunk and deteriorating.
Over the remnants of a half-cup of Strongbow cider, Séamus told me his story:
‘When I came here I didn’t know the ropes. ’Twasn’t to Cricklewood at all I came first and later, then, I even went to Scotland and Australia. Most of all I love Scotland. Look at that wall there behind you, that says it all. Celtic, Celtic, Celtic. They are two points clear of Rangers now and playing them on Sunday. Today’s Saturday, isn’t it? It’s Friday? Oh yeah. Well, they’re playing anyway Sunday week in Celtic Park. With a bit of luck I might be up there myself. I used to go to see them all the time. I love them.
‘The area has changed for the worse. One time even this very house was full of characters. There was poor auld Patsy, Billy Simpson—who I had great time for altogether—and Eoin Kilbane. They’re all gone. Dead. Drink had a lot to do with it and all, like.
‘I’m here nearly twelve years. Another great mate of mine who lived here got a council flat in St Paul’s Avenue. He drank forty-three cans in the one day. Now, Jesus, if I done that I’d be stone dead. No bother at all to him. He’s a big man.
‘Over the years, with regards work, we were all labouring. The last few years I’ve gone a bit downhill. Me back is knackered. I worked on a golf course in my hometown when I was about fifteen and I was trying to keep up with the big lads. They were big strong men and that is where I done in me back. There was an older man on the job, who was about sixty, and “Slow it down,” he said to me. “You’re trying to keep up with us.” Big rocks. Doing up Westport Golf Course. Jaysus it’s a fine golf course now. We lifted rocks onto trailers and I done in me back.
‘There was plenty work when I came over here. Now there is no work. Half of them are dead anyway. Few pints after work. I would say it’s much worse now. In Ireland it’s bad too—I listen to Radio Éireann and ten percent unemployment in Ireland.
‘There’s a céad míle fáilte there for me any time I want but I cannot go back to nothing. My sister is there and she has the home place and that. Great girl but she wants me back. But what would I go back to? Back to nothing, like. And I would be a waste of space to her. Jesus, it would be all right if things were right, like. Oh, she wants me back, alright. She’s not worried about money or nothing. She doesn’t care about nothing. But sure I’m after spending all me life in England and to go back with nothing, just empty pockets. Wouldn’t I look great? So everybody has their own little thing.
‘Leaving the drink aside? It’s impossible almost. When you live in a room on your own. I palled around with a lovely girl. She got fed up of me. She is a nurse. She done everything she possibly could to put me on the straight and narrow. She brought me back to Killarney. And I hope they lift the All-Ireland for that reason.
‘Great girl. Brought me back and done everything for me. I was off drink then and it would only take something, like Rangers to beat Celtic or something like that.
‘They’re playing Sunday week now, Celtic and Rangers. I might make it yet. Jesus, we might all go. We might all go.
‘I was here when I was off the drink. I used to go to Celtic Park every few weeks. At the same time all me mates were all heavy drinkers. Jesus—they’re all dead now. Tom is the only survivor. Some of them would knock on the door at two or three o’clock in the morning. And sure I’d answer the door straight away for them, no problem at all. Jesus, they’re dead now. The man other side that wall there. Billy Simpson. He was sixty-eight. And Patsy was in the room across, he was sixty-nine. And Eoin in the back room was from Achill Island. But Jesus, we were all the one gang, a crazy gang. All great mates. Nobody would see each other wrong. It’s a different ball game now. It’s beating me now and all, I know it is. At the same time I’m fighting a good aul’ battle, as best I can.
‘I’m in love with a lovely girl, but sure it’s drink again. She was going to marry me and everything if I gave it up. Didn’t happen, like. But sure a man cannot be an altar boy all his life, can he? When you weigh it up, like. Great girl, love her to bits.
‘The landlord is not up to much, hasn’t got much time for me. He was around a while ago, could still be here. All he thinks about is money, money, money. Like ABBA, you remember the song, “Money, money, money, it’s a rich man’s world”? Well, he can have his fucking money. That’s the way I look at it. He’ll only wait for somebody to die and he does up the room straight away and moves someone else in. There’s more to life than money. Do you know what he should do now? He should go out to Stockholm in Sweden and meet that girl there in the poster, Agnetha, look at her. She could sing that song to him. A week in Stockholm would do him good. It’s my life ambition to meet her, and please God I will some day. I have her number in that drawer there somewhere. I used to write to her and everything but she didn’t write back to me, though.
‘I usually go to a café. There is a kitchen here in the building but it’s dog rough, very seldom I eat here.
‘All my mates are dead. I have no company here at all. I’m not really happy here. The move is on. Only a matter of time. I don’t know where, though, as close as possible to Celtic Park would suit me, that’s for sure.
‘I’ll give you one bit of advice, the next time you go on holiday, don’t go out to France, or Japan or anywhere like that. Go to Celtic Park. That’s where you’ll find atmosphere. All Irish.
‘I was home about two years ago, and I do phone home regular. ’Twas John Glynn and the people from the hall here that brought me back last time. ’Twas sort of embarrassing, like, everybody has their pride and everything else. I went back and I had nothing. The family gave me money and everything and it was embarrassing, like.
‘My family hadn’t much money, my father might sell an auld cow or a bullock or a sheep or that type of thing to pay the rates. He struggled to bring up the family. There was eight of us and two died. He went drinking a Fair day, a few bottles of stout maybe. He wouldn’t drink then until the next Fair day, until he sold something else. He came up the hard way.
‘I was awful young when I had a drink. I was only going to school, like. There was a Horse Fair in Westport, show-jumping and all that. The auld fella was in one part of the tent and I was at another. I was only about ten or eleven. He didn’t see me. Me mates were buying me drink. He couldn’t afford a drink.
‘I went flat out with the drinking then as a teenager. I shouldn’t be alive at all, you know. I don’t deserve to be alive. Flat out altogether. Fourteen, fifteen, everything. The swinging sixties. Drink, women and gambling. Gambling came first, still does and all.
‘Kato Star—look at the picture of him up there behind you and the crucifix underneath him. I had four hundred pounds on him Saint Stephen’s Day. He sailed in and I told the whole town, days and days before this. I even told Julie to put her last set of knickers on him. She didn’t back him at all. I put everything I had on him, hadn’t a bob left for Christmas. Three pounds.
‘He won at 5-4 and I got nine hundred pounds back and I painted the town red. I went stone mad.
‘I don’t go the pub much any more, Jaysus, it’s too dear, over three pounds a pint. I’m drinking cans of cider now. Three of me mates are dead and the best mate I had has gone. He got a flat. I don’t have his phone number; I have a mobile there and don’t know how to use it.
‘I get the papers every morning down the road there. I get the Mayo News and all, like.
‘Nice to keep in touch, like. I can see an All-Ireland in that team yet.
‘The house and woman I had all went simultaneously—do you like that word? It means together at the one time! I was engaged to her and all that. I had a house in Westport, built it myself with these two paws. Built it meself, roofed it meself and plastered it meself. Anyway, things didn’t work out. We’re the best of friends. She got married since and she has four daughters now. And look at me here in this room. I have nothing here. Even the mouse pulled out. There was a mouse here one time but he pulled out. He got fed up.
‘I love the gambling. I’m good at it, though. Oh Jesus, I’m well ahead of the bookie. Honest to Jesus. Well ahead of them. There’s a man up there in Ladbrokes, he hates to see me coming. Hates the sight of me. I done it again the weekend. Man United they were 4-2, didn’t collect for a week. I do it all the time.
‘There’s a great kick out of it. Even poor auld Julie. She never bet in her life and she loves her football. Now she would think nothing about putting a few hundred pound on a football team! Talking about the future, there’s a lad from Northern Ireland—McIlroy. Oh Jaysus, there’s money to be made on him yet. He’s going to go places in a big way.
‘Another Tiger Woods.
‘If I got me aul’ head together I could take the bookie. I could leave William Hill in the park. Every morning when I get out of that bed I think, what can I get William Hill for? That’s my life’s ambition, to leave William Hill in the park. Oh, leave him begging for cigarette butts. In the park. Me life’s ambition.’