Mark O’Halloran, Writer and Actor

For me, drinking has become related to my creative impulses. If I am writing, I would probably go out every night and have two or three glasses of wine in my local bar and then take notes on the walk home. I would be afraid if I gave that up! I know writers who have been in trouble with drink and gave it up and found it difficult to find a new creative way after.

Also, drinking allows for random association in your head. I’m not talking about drunkenness, just a few glasses. If I was to look through my notebooks, a lot of stuff there I have come up with after having a few glasses of wine. I don’t know if those thoughts would have been there otherwise, which is interesting.

Beryl Bainbridge talks about cigarettes doing that for her. I mean, she drinks also, but when she gave up cigarettes she stopped writing for ages.

As a young teenager, drink was talked about as being a maturity thing. I got served in pubs at fifteen, but I had been drinking flagons of cider from about the age of fourteen onwards. We did lots of outdoors drinking down the tracks in Ennis or over where the Bishop’s field used to be near the river. If we couldn’t get drink we talked about how we were going to get drink. It was a massive part of our lives and being able to hold your drink was really important. There was never a thought that you wouldn’t drink. It was always something you would do when you grew older.

If you think about it, how many pubs are there in Ennis? I mean, there are a lot of them and drinking is a huge part of the social scene in rural Ireland. It’s massive. It’s there for christenings and weddings and funerals and every day during the week also for a lot of people.

I don’t know whether it’s something to do with the fact that Irish people aren’t very direct with each other. When you are trying to understand what Irish people are talking about you have to go through lots of different routes, whereas with drink, it cuts all that out. I think there is also a shame element in it. Irish people like the shame of the morning after in some perverse way.

When we were younger, if you were found surrounded in a pool of your own vomit somewhere in a field or near the tracks it would be seen as a disgrace. However, at seventeen you were brought into a bar with your father and bought your first pint. The lads would buy you three or four pints and you would be a bit locked and go home.

It is so ingrained in our social lives that we don’t know any other way to interact with each other. Also we’re not a great theatre- or opera-going population. I mean, in the west of Ireland there isn’t a lot to do. Men went to the pubs to get away from the women and children. I know that sounds very sexist, but I think it was a great way for men to communicate with each other.

Drink in theatre is constant as a theme. McPherson goes through it in every single play and it is also a constant in Tom Murphy’s plays. In fact, I think drink is mentioned in every Irish play there is! There are wonderful descriptions of the wake in Playboy of the Western World, when the characters are dry retching on the holy stones at the funeral and so on.

I’d love to know are Irish people actually drinking more than they did before.

I think men always drank in the way they do.

In Dublin, those addicted to drugs and homeless are seen as a terrible shame. For the most part, people are able to keep it together with drink and still function. We tend to forgive a problem drinker a lot more than we would another addiction. I think that’s because in most Irish families there is always someone with a drink problem.

I think there is a huge emotional catastrophe involved with drink—it really does wreck families.

A friend of my father’s was known as an alcoholic. The reason he was known as an alcoholic was that he drank so many pints and got himself into such a state that he was brought to hospital. And that was an alcoholic. My mother had the opinion if you only drank beer and didn’t drink spirits, you couldn’t be an alcoholic, which I kind of subscribed to. I never drink spirits now in case I become an alcoholic!

Irish people are very slow to use the word ‘alcoholic’. I know people who would have been friends of mine who would have gone through treatment because of drink. Others would say to me, ‘I never saw them drunk!’

There is a huge fear around people who don’t drink. There is a fear they are watching you. They’re counting how many drinks you’re having.

Also, generally speaking, Irish people are very good with drink. It is great fun! It becomes oppressive after a while. I mean, you have to be careful of it, because it’s so massively accessible and such a part of our social and family lives. No matter if you never had it in your family you have to be careful with yourself around drink. If you’re drinking heavily in your late twenties it can develop quickly into something rather painful for everybody.

Secondary school is the place to start talking about the issue—when I think back, there was no education whatsoever. I would say a majority of schoolchildren drink so there should be open discussion.

I remember from my own school days, people who didn’t drink were stupid or squares. It’s as simple as that—they were holy Joes who needed Pioneers badges. I got hooked by all the rock ‘n’ roll myths. You know, the Jack Daniels and cigarettes, annihilation and all that!

I have a number of friends who are alcoholic and to a greater or lesser extent in denial about it. There are people who, when I was a kid, from the moment they drank I knew they were insane with drink. I certainly would know the damage it does and it makes people, especially around children, emotionally promiscuous with their children. With drink on, it’s friendly, it’s great and so on. With no drink it’s standoffish and prudish.

The not knowing what is coming back at you screws kids.

It’s a big thing with Irish weddings as well—there’s a thought that you shouldn’t bring kids because we’ll all be getting drunk. That’s a uniquely Irish thing.

Firstly, I find I could drink every day, and when I’m doing a play I do drink every day. I would have two glasses of wine. At the weekends I’d have more. By some people’s definition that’s a lot. It doesn’t create a problem for me. I live alone and I don’t have children so it’s all about maintaining my own sanity. If I drank heavily I would lose my mind. Other people can do it quite easily. I do appreciate the creative impulses that it unleashes, though. When I’m not writing I mightn’t drink at all.

For a year I gave up drink. For it to work, I think you have to stop judging people and get into a totally different headspace. I felt sorry for a lot of people. You also just have very little tolerance for spending five hours in a pub. You go in for an hour and leave. Going into clubs, you have to leave about 12.45, when it all goes nuts. Walking home, the town is just like 28 Days Later—zombies, freaks and vomit—it’s very strange. It was a good year for me. I got extremely healthy and found I had so much time.

I decided to go back to drink because I like drinking. I like pubs. My local I love. It’s a part of my life. My friends all drink. I felt I was being very isolated without it. We could all do Bikram yoga four times a week, but reality is a different matter!

The local I go to is interesting in that you can go there and you know the people vaguely, but they wouldn’t know anything about what their family lives are like. Your friends call in and the bar staff you know really well. There is something light in the place and detached from the heaviness of your work and there is a breathing space there. I think a really good bar gives that to its clientele.

In general, the Irish are not the type of people who visit each other’s houses. We never had visitors growing up, maybe on a Sunday afternoon, perhaps. We meet outside the house.

When I came to write and act in Adam and Paul I spent a lot of time studying addicts. Those boys and girls I looked at on the street, first off I was interested in them physically. I saw both characters as two classic clown characters, because the drink has always been a staple of comedy. So I wanted to shift it on to drugs. I always said the character Tom Murphy played, the reasons he became an addict and all that was because no one held him as a child. Without that stability, what else is there except to cover it all up with whatever drug you can find? I think alcohol does that for a lot of people as well.

It was—the first thing I noticed when I came to Dublin was the heroin problem, and I thought it was shocking. It’s interesting that those lads comes from places where families are in great difficulty and where there is no stability—without stability you can’t stand up on your own two feet, really.

I’m interested in the subject as a writer but I don’t want to write about alcoholism, just like Adam and Paul was never about drug addiction. I’m interested in what it does. I’m writing a family story at the moment and I think drink is going to be a major part of it. It’s hard to write an Irish family story without it.

I feel like I’m in the middle of a drinking culture so to comment on it is really strange.

The acting community has always been hard drinkers. You know the Donal McCanns and all of that. The Abbey was famous for the drink. These days there is so much more of a lid on it. If someone came in with drink on their breath there would be serious trouble from the other actors. Nobody wants it any more and everybody is much more professional.

When you look at what happens to an actor going on stage—it’s the same amount of adrenalin you get from a car crash. It gives you [a] huge high and you can’t go home with that coursing through your veins. You won’t sleep—I’ve tried it. For my year off drink I was doing a few plays and it would be six a.m. when I’d fall asleep. Whereas two glasses of wine can take the edge off things. I talked to an older actor once and I said something about another actor being an alcoholic in the nineteeen-seventies.

His reply was that ‘Ah, we were all alcoholics in the seventies. You got over it!’