Contents

Cover

Title page

Introduction

1. Taken to the Sup

2. I Said ‘Yes, Yes, Yes’

Des Bishop

3. A Day in the Life

Frances Black

4. Past Pioneers

Mary Coughlan

5. The Forgotten Irish

John Leahy

6. Guinness and Late Nights

Mark O’Halloran

7. Teenage Kicks and Night Raving

Niall Toibin

8. The State of Us

Conclusion: Where to Next?

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Copyright

About the Author

About Gill & Macmillan

Introduction

It seems strange saying this now, having invested the last year of my life writing and researching this book, but I never consciously planned on writing about either my own or Ireland’s association with alcohol. Same way, I suppose, I never intentionally set out to develop a drinking problem. Both just happened organically, taking me by surprise, leading me along a more scenic, albeit bumpier, route. The seed for this writing lies in an Irish Times article I wrote in 2008, which in turn followed a radio interview with Dave Fanning on the ‘Tubridy Show’ a little time earlier. I owe thanks to Tom Donnelly in RTÉ Radio for the platform to begin with and Shane Hegarty in the Irish Times for encouraging me to turn those initial comments into print.

The reaction to both media outings, and to my thoughts on living sober in Ireland, seemed to strike a chord. I received dozens of letters and emails from a wide range of people, from 18-year-old teenagers to 80-year-old clergy, expressing support and telling me of their own struggles. Several of the letters and cards went unsigned, and simply offered messages of mutual understanding. I remember being at a social function some weeks after the Irish Times article appeared, and someone whom I had never met before told me of his own battles with alcohol, and the fact he felt unable to admit it or deal with it effectively. He was a respected member of his community, known as a ‘heavy drinker’, he said, and facilitated as such. He felt unable to discuss his inner torment with family or friends. We chatted for a while and then he returned to the bar. The image of him—bulk hunched and back turned—putting his arm around the shoulder of a fellow drinker as he took his seat at the counter stuck with me.

Following this, I began to reflect on secrecy, alcohol and Irish society. How emotionally open and upfront have we really become as a society? Is it still taboo to admit defeat to something like alcohol in Ireland, and impossible not to feel socially scarred as a result? What difficulties arise as a result of the interaction between society and sobriety in twenty-first-century Ireland? Are problem drinkers born or do they develop and evolve over time? Is there a place for the non-drinker in Irish social life? These were all the initial questions, flirting for answers in the back of my mind. Both of those personal media outings came three years into my sobriety, at a time when I was very much enjoying life, both personal and professional. It’s worth pointing out that sobriety was never something I kept hidden or under wraps. From the start, I was quite comfortable with the fact that I had sought help for my drinking, much the same way a diabetic seeks insulin. Having said that, I had been careful, with much of my writing, not to fall into the confessional, first-person genre of journalism, which has been gradually diluted by unchecked ego since the days of Hunter S. Thompson and the everyday descriptive poetry of Robert Lowell.

When fashion journalists spend a night on the streets, so they can write about how it would feel for them to be homeless (minus their haute couture), then you know conscience-driven journalism has taken a wrong turn somewhere. I feel the need to justify myself, then, in the face of a confessional journalism culture, where shock and awe sometimes replace probing and insight as the determining factors. We also live in an age where rehab has gone very public, with ‘personalities’ frequently stepping in and out of treatment, from where their tell-all stories are offered to the highest bidder. Behavioural crucifixion and salvation sell—just tune into Jonathan Ross any Friday night if you’re looking for proof.

This was never intended as an academic endeavour, more a teasing out of some of the issues behind Ireland’s drinking culture through my own personal insights. My reasons for laying down my thoughts were as much determined by the society I live in as by any lingering desire or need to make public my personal self or to mark a break with my past. My security with sobriety seemed to climax at a time when Ireland’s problematic drinking patterns had been soaring unchecked for almost a decade. It’s not that I felt a duty, but I felt qualified to examine some of the reasons for our problem drinking and how it is being addressed. That, coupled with the fact I was also just plain curious.

That’s not to say I don’t have reservations about exercising what I hope will be interpreted as emotional honesty. I’m conscious of family and friends reading aspects of this publication and not being wholly comfortable with my revelations. I’m conscious of my son picking this up as a teenager and having to deal with my shortcomings as a father during my drinking and how that may subsequently impact on him emotionally. Perhaps the guilt and shame of abusing alcohol never quite leave you, and there’s an inclination to keep those feelings hidden or suppressed. It’s something I have thought long and hard about—the dangers of offloading my story at any cost and of being labelled as the guy who pillaged his problem past for a book. I’m wary, then, of becoming a one-issue candidate who hurts the feelings of others needlessly and recklessly on the road to redemption. These are all issues I have taken into account before embarking on this examination.

Yet there is, in my view, far too much secrecy around the subjects of alcoholism and problem drinking in Ireland of 2009. There are too many stories that remain untold and far too much anxiety and stress and trouble that problem drinkers endure and cannot relay because society is the way it is. The irony is that in my personal life I’m careful not to allow my sobriety to become a defining characteristic. And yet, here I am writing about it! In the end, I guess it came down to the fact that I’m not the person I describe in the first two chapters any more, and haven’t been for a very long time. Hopefully those who know me will recognise that. And the old cliché abounds: if retelling my struggle with alcohol offers insight to someone, one person even, currently in the depths of that struggle, then the work will have been worthwhile.

I have tried also to collate some of the reports, studies and statistics available in relation to Ireland’s current relationship with alcohol. While the information is constantly changing and being updated, some key facts remain. Firstly, that overall alcohol consumption grew faster in Ireland than anywhere else in Europe between 1996 and 2003. The rise of the off-licence, accounting for just 19 per cent of sales in 1991 and more than 35 per cent in 2006, is another noticeable trend, changing our drinking patterns to a more insular, domestic practice. The change in our drinking patterns has also been fuelled by the rise in consumption of wine, which grew fourfold between 1985 and 2003. Other statistics and analysis, such as the rise in alcohol-related illness, spikes in binge-drinking levels among the young and the rise in alcohol-related suicide, are contained in later chapters.

During the course of the research for this book, I received an email from Dr Stanton Peele, one of the world’s foremost addiction thinkers. He told me he had read what I had written in the Irish Times. His probing reply took me a little by surprise. ‘I’m glad you’ve stopped drinking, if that makes you happy,’ he said, ‘but rather than being a revelation to the Irish—that they drink too much—this is of one piece with the Irish binge-purge sensibility, and actually reinforces their underlying alcohol pathology. You probably don’t want to read my book, where I say, “If you see the choice as being one between abstinence and excess, you’ve already lost the battle.”’

As time has gone on, I’ve come to see sobriety less as a clinical or psychological choice and more as a lifestyle one, like cutting out meat or sweet foods. That way, I manage to sidestep all the alcoholic definition debates and all the abstinence versus moderation dilemmas that stalk the mind of many a problem drinker in Ireland.

I may have already lost the battle, as Dr Peele suggests, but I’m enjoying the struggle nevertheless.

His point fails, though, to fully grasp the Irish cultural and historical experience. Colonisation, hardship, religious repression, emotional need, greed and economic giddiness are all contributory factors to the Irish experience and relationship with alcohol. For many in this country, drinking excessively helps numb that experience, and has done so for generations. To paraphrase Homer Simpson, in Ireland, alcohol is often the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems.

My personal opinion is that it is only when we have a sincere national discourse around some of the issues behind our problem drinking that a new relationship with alcohol can begin to assert itself. It won’t, in my view, come about by importing a café culture, or by limiting or tailoring the current drinking culture by exclusively legislative means or information campaigns. It will come about only by a change of mindset, by a deeper understanding of why the Irish drink the way they do, and what can be done to tackle some of the underlying reasons for our behaviour with alcohol.

A UK-based employment specialist I met on holidays was telling me about his experience working with high-flying executives. He couldn’t get his head around the fact that often when he put forward Irish clients for interview with Irish employers, they would meet in a bar and, in his words, ‘have five or six Guinness to break the ice’. Some of the jobs they were going for had salaries of upwards of £100,000 per annum, and going on the lash before signing on the dotted line was the culturally done thing. It didn’t happen with other nationalities, he noted. It’s this accepted embedded relationship between the Irish and alcohol that is the core of our societal issues with drink, and I hope that some of that reveals itself in this narrative.

I recently read about Chris Matthews—a liberal political pundit on MSNBC, and a proud Irish-American. On the MSNBC morning show, responding to a joke by Mika Brzezinski about his drinking at a prominent Irish social event, Matthews declared, ‘Despite the ethnic stereotype, I haven’t had a drink since 1994.’ The problem is, though: this is the Irish cultural stereotype. As Dr Peele notes, ‘Addiction thinker George Vaillant found that Irish-Americans in Boston were seven times as likely to become alcoholics as Italian, Greek and Jewish Americans—at the same time as they were more likely to abstain.’

The observation appears to be backed up here by a recent Department of Health study, which found that Ireland is the European country with the lowest daily drinking rate and the highest binge-drinking rate. Only two percent of Irish men drink daily, while nearly half binge weekly. This is the virtual reverse of drinking patterns by Italians, for instance. Abstinence and excess are familiar bedfellows in Ireland’s relationship with alcohol. We opt for cut out before cut down. How many of us, for instance, have woken up after a heavy night to vow, ‘Never again’?

There also exists an often tense relationship between sobriety and socialising in Ireland. One of my preferred bars in Cork, and also one of the oldest in the city centre, serves sandwiches throughout the day. I tend to pop in regularly, enjoy sitting at the bar chatting with staff or local regulars. But after 7 p.m., the bar stops serving coffee and tea. Why is that? Is it saying that the night is the sole preserve of the drinking classes? Is it saying that my money is okay during the day, when alcohol sales are off peak, but come the dark, I’m persona non grata? It’s a small point, but a point to be made nonetheless. This mindset needs to change so that the distinction between day and night is blurred, and public houses (those that are left) can concern themselves less with excess and more with enjoyment, experience and tangible social engagement. Last St Patrick’s Day in Dublin, I organised to meet two friends who don’t drink or take drugs any more. We were determined to mark the national day of Irishness, and set ourselves the task of getting a cup of coffee post-9 p.m. in the city centre. Bewleys duly obliged, but given the night that was in it, they closed at 9.30 p.m. Business was quiet. Two of us went looking for a cup of coffee in Temple Bar. Practically every coffee machine had been turned off since 6 p.m. Bar workers shook their heads, looking at us as if we were from a different planet. In many ways we were.

Staying sober and having what might be termed ‘a fun night out’ are often mutually exclusive for Irish people. A sober night is to be endured rather than enjoyed. In company, you’re a lift home, a finder of bags and coats, a shoulder to cry on. With the advent of late-night bars, the art of conversation has been further muted, overdubbed by slurs and sound systems. Irish publicans have confused overbearingly loud music with atmosphere. I’m beginning to sound like your parents. I know. And that’s the other thing with this sobriety lark—it’s hard not to over-moralise, testing to remain non-judgmental. It’s difficult to offer insight without sounding like you’re casting a shadow from the moral high ground. To comment without patronising. Over the coming pages, I have attempted to lay down a recollection of my own journey from adolescent experimentation to problem drinking and beyond. Following from that there is an engagement with the wider issues of alcohol abuse and Irish society. Drinkers, like those I encountered in London and Tipperary, can be at once deluded and insightful, warm and revolting. It was my intention to portray that world in an authentic manner, interfering as little as possible in its telling.

Along the way countless persons have helped me with publication and I owe them a huge debt of gratitude. Fergal Tobin at Gill & Macmillan was the first publisher to pick up the phone and broach the subject of turning my thoughts into a book. Others such as John Leahy, Dr Chris Luke, the Night Ravens in Copenhagen, Mannix Berry and Catriona Molineaux, Shane Malone, Sophie Johnston, Professor Joe Barry, Faith O’Grady and many more, all gave freely of their time and I am hugely thankful to them for their contributions and observations. As for those who told me their own stories, the people I met in London and Tipperary, in the Aislinn Centre in Kilkenny or casually along the way, I remain full of admiration for their honesty and daily struggle. Others who allowed their stories and insight to weave through the narrative—Mary Coughlan, Mark O’Halloran, Niall Toibin, John Leahy, Frances Black and Des Bishop—added enormously to the variety of the text and were very giving of their time and patience.

Even after spending a year examining the subject of alcohol abuse and consulting widely on the topic, I’m still unclear as to why I ended up a ‘problem drinker’. I’m not sure the pathology matters, though, as much as the personal approach to dealing with the issue. Sometimes, we can get too caught up in the ‘why’ rather than dealing with the ‘what now’. I’m conscious, too, that I have taken a particular editorial line when talking about the relationship between the Irish and alcohol. Many of those interviewed had acute difficulties with alcohol. Of course not everyone who drinks runs into problems. Moderate drinking is a fine means of social interaction. I’d be at it myself if I was able and there are plenty in Ireland, from individual publicans to large brewing companies, able to articulate the merits of such socialising. For this publication, though, my interest lay more in the point where moderate drinking becomes problem drinking, both on a personal and societal level, and what the consequences of that change are and how it can be dealt with.

In my personal life I realise I have been incredibly fortunate. My struggles have given me a different understanding of life in Ireland—something of an outsider’s lens, perhaps. I only hope I have done the subject justice and offered some added understanding of what, or who, drives us to drink the way we do.

The first time I got drunk was 1991. I know this because after a naggin of Bacardi, I thought I was a fighter pilot who sang U2’s hit single ‘One’ (released in November that year) while simultaneously and indiscriminately bombarding the urban sprawl below—in this case Stephen Corcoran’s first-floor landing—with the remnants of a snack box from Enzo’s takeaway. Analyse that.

I remember little else, except a feeling of otherworldliness, of having pushed through the fur coats at the back of my mind and entered a new exciting universe, where the drink and I shared the throne. Growing up in a town like Ennis, where one local swimming pool had signs stating, ‘No Heavy Petting in the Deep End’ and graffiti such as ‘Heavy Metle, Loud and Poud’, there wasn’t much else to do besides getting out of it. In fact, practically every conversation from the age of about 14 onwards revolved around drink or, more to the point, how to get it. You were judged by how many pints you could hold, where you could get served, how sick you got and what the consequences were. You talked about the easiest off-licence to get served in, what bars and nightclubs accepted fake ids, and what were the best spirits to mix together. There were buses organised to nightclubs in neighbouring towns, which turned into rampaging drink tours of places like Gort and Lahinch. There were teenage discos where drink was hidden in urinals hours beforehand. There were cans in the cinema, bottles at dawn on scouting weekends. There was even a healthy bootleg market, where alcohol and cigarettes which were stolen from local grocers were sold at knockdown rates. Everything, and I mean everything, revolved around drink.

Looking back, my drinking career was more Pádraig Harrington than Tiger Woods, a steady rise as opposed to a dramatic and alarming early introduction. In fact, most Irish teenagers would have had the same type of experiences as I had. There was no real self-destruct button in evidence at that point, and my adolescent boozing would have been considered routine by Irish standards. Faking ID cards, siphoning a bit of spirits from the drinks cabinet at home or slowly building up my tolerance levels from two pints of Carling to three—it was all pretty normal stuff.

There were plenty of weekend mornings when I woke with vomit strewn sheets, or had to struggle to recall whose mouth my tongue had found itself resting in the previous night. Lucky girl. Ennis was well known for people getting into bars from about the age of 15 onwards—the general attitude was that it was better for youngsters to be in the pubs than in fields somewhere. Ennis was also known as a strong drinking town which prided itself on the number of pubs per capita and the co-dependency between traditional music, craic and pints.

Farmers on market day filled the bars of the Market, revellers from all over the county filled the narrow streets all weekend, and tourists wandered about bemused by the free-for-all that passed for acceptable nightlife.

It seems, too, on one level, the generally accepting societal response to underage drinking in the area has changed little since the early nineties. Some months back, one local newspaper carried the headline ‘Kids on the Booze’, after a 17-year-old in court named three outlets in the town where alcohol was freely available. Local publican Declan Brandon, whose premises was not one of those named, and who has tried to promote music in his venue in the town for decades, was quoted as saying the issue of underage drinking was a very hard one to police, and compounded by the fact that ‘every house is like a pub or off-licence at this stage. There is far too much alcohol around the place. There should be far more restrictions on the availability of alcohol outside pubs.’ He’s right, of course, as the crushed-can-littered fields and estates around Ennis can testify.

The local nightclub was The Queens, and the main ambition of any discerning Ennis youth from early adolescence was to conjure ways to get past the bouncers and enter what seemed like hallowed ground. ids were passed down from older brothers, or, with the advent of basic home computers, some were made and sold. Some tried their luck booking into the hotel adjacent for the night or holding the hand of a far older girl on the way in. Once inside, it was all about kissing girls and drinking pints. Later, thanks mainly to Tom Cruise, cocktails entered the fray. Drinking away from bars, or bush drinking, as it was known, was as popular when you were of legal age as it was through adolescence and beyond. The choice of location was either the rail tracks adjacent to the town, or the girls’ convent, which had the added comfort of bus shelters. Years later, fellow Ennis native Mark O’Halloran told me that much of the inspiration for his film Garage, in which youths gather on rail tracks to drink cans, was taken from growing up in Ennis. Invariably three or four cans would be downed before hitting the bars between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m.—some of the group would have been in their thirties with good regular incomes and perhaps married with kids, but they were still drawn to the outdoor boozing. It was both a non-conformist and, more to the point, a financial thing. After a quick pit stop in one of the town’s many bars, the general form was to try to blag your way into one of the town’s nightclubs, where stealing drink became part and parcel of the night out. This was done by nonchalantly joining a group with a table of drink piled high, and passing a full pint backwards to an accomplice waiting yards away who could then quickly make a getaway. On the dance floor, ‘Cotton Eye Joe’, ‘Dirty Dancing’ and ‘Come on Eileen’ provided the backing tracks.

From time to time a new Garda drive in the town would see a number of bars raided and fines imposed, but generally it never lasted too long. Drugs had yet to make their way wholesale into rural communities, and the general attitude seemed to be that this sort of mass alcohol abuse was part of the fabric for any market town. On the rare occasions you went out for dinner, you booked a table early—say seven or half past—so that you’d have it over with by 9 p.m., when the real socialising could start.

It’s not that there was much else to do—no arthouse cinema, theatre, art galleries, few if any gyms, restaurants were still of the beef-or-salmon variety, and dinner parties were something you wore a tuxedo for. Welcome to 1980s Ireland, then.

It was sort of like that community in ‘The Wicker Man’—everyone knows something is not right, but all are complicit and reliant upon continuing the wrongs through the next generation in order to keep the social fabric intact. In other words, once the problem was contained within the community it was accepted and fertilised. The bars and nightclubs seemed happy enough to be cultivating their future customers young, while parents saw it as a rite of passage for early adolescents to have a pint.

Many youngsters were taken to the bar by their parents first, at 15 or 16, and given their first pint. For the majority this heralded the arrival of adulthood.

This societal acceptance existed, probably, in every other town in Ireland too, and would eventually lead Ireland to have one of the highest rates of binge-drinking in Europe and an alarming level of suicide among under-25s. It didn’t take a genius to spot the warning signs—every social function, wedding, birthday, christening, birth, death and celebration in Ireland revolved around the pub and pub life, and still does to a certain extent. For young adults, especially growing up in a small close-knit community like Ennis, the majority of formative experiences were filtered through an alcoholic gauze. I know it was that way for me. I look back at debs nights where I was lying on the ground getting sick, on post-match underage celebrations where trainers and players held up the bar. Alcohol soaked the fabric of pretty much every aspect of life in a town like Ennis and very few people seemed concerned about doing anything about it.

——

With secondary school out of the way, I set my sights on university and headed for University College Cork, where I enrolled in Arts, the academic equivalent of hedging your bets. I first got accommodation in digs, with an elderly lady near the university. Initially college life was a rollercoaster of free drink, beat-the-clock promotions, hazy afternoons and missed morning lectures. My mind was adjusting to the new academic light, trapped between small-town mentality and medium-city freedom. I quickly got into the swing of things, bought a pair of dungarees, dyed my hair red and settled in for an extended party. Oasis and Blur were waging a Britpop war and Pulp were heralding common people. David Gray was playing introspective ditties to a few hundred students in bars on Barrack Street and sounding more despondent each time, while Sir Henry’s nightclub was witnessing the peak of the Ecstasy-fuelled dance scene. I bought my first bottle of wine, ate in my first restaurant without my parents present, and became acquainted with Sophocles and shots, often at the same time.

The digs came to an abrupt end when I fell asleep across the kindly lady’s bathroom door while trying to get sick one night. This had the effect of denying her access to her morning denture routine. I told my mother the food was terrible and the room cold, and she called the lady to say I wouldn’t be coming back. The kindly lady responded by telling my mother I had the beginnings of a serious drinking problem. We all laughed, and I settled into a newly built townhouse behind an off-licence and within a stone’s throw of the student nightclub quarter.

Drink of choice in those days was bottles of lager or flagons of cider at home (mostly Linden Village or Old Somerset or other such vinegars with questionable cider complexes), while pints and shots were opted for towards the end of the night. Drink was cheap—this was still the time of legally reduced prices and promotions in bars where shots were free or pints half price. I always had a student job, so whatever spare cash I earned was invested in socialising. There was an inevitable tension involved in engaging with this more upfront and adult student life. I began learning to cook (pork chops on a bed of instant rice) and buying a few bottles of Carling to accompany the cooking—sometimes the Carling doubled up as a sauté. I thought it was posh. In retrospect it was more of a means of masking inadequacy.

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday were the student nights, while the temptation to blow the week’s money on a Sunday night was ever present. I flirted with both socialism and Republicanism, combining nothing for everyone with dying for Ireland. Neither cause lasted very long. Drugs were mainly limited to hash and weed and because money was tight and supply was expensive, the quantities involved were small.

There was never a moment when I thought drinking three or four nights a week was cause for concern. In many ways it wasn’t. Society didn’t frown upon it, parents never questioned it and friends were all doing the same, if not more. Not much room for a reality check there, then. The first summer after college was spent in Cape Cod, as was the subsequent one, and in both cases drinking took on a daily regularity. I got work in an old hippie store called Yellow Orange, on Main Street in Falmouth, which sold Beatles T-shirts and Indian jewellery. I spent two summers behind the till, getting an education in the 1960s counterculture three decades after the event, and got to know an assortment of drifters who used the shop as a hangout. Included was Chris, an ex-fisherman, by this stage a heroin addict who had HIV/AIDS and sold the shop his monthly supply of uppers and downers in order to feed his habit. Others, such as Happy, a dope addict, or Christine, an amateur hairdresser, would stop by and buy the pills for $2 a go, asking for ‘blue’ or ‘pink’ toilet paper, depending on which ones they wanted. Steve, the owner, who missed out on Woodstock because all his staff took the day off, was glad of the company behind the counter and let me have the run of the place. I had thoughts of staying on and taking over the shop, perhaps writing the Great American Novel or picking up work on a fishing trawler out of Woods Hole in the off season. Steve introduced me to Eddie, an Irish-American mobster whose father had been shot dead by the Mafia in Boston on his tenth birthday. Eddie was on the Cape getting away from a life of hustling, and sold grass to keep things ticking over. I bought it in enough quantities to make sure I didn’t have to pay for my own use, while Eddie would lecture me from time to time—‘Hey Bryannn, you make sure you call your mudder in Oireland every week, ya hear?’

Another guy who came into the shop was Brian, an Irish-American who never worked a day in his life, living off his wife’s income and eating in the local Chinese restaurant every day. He carried a photograph in his wallet of his dead father lying in his coffin, which always struck me as very odd.

Last I heard, Chris died, Happy was destitute, having moved from grass to crack, Christine was placed in a psychiatric hospital for murdering her daughter, and Brian still eats in the same Chinese restaurant every day. The shop is now a laundry store, with Steve working administration for a power-tripping college graduate, having failed to make astute investments down through the years. His only regret is not closing the shop for Woodstock.

Those summers were seen as time off from college, and so anything went and was excused. Bottles of Michelob, shots of tequila, bags of grass and insect bites were the extent to which I engaged with wider American culture outside Falmouth. For my nineteenth birthday, I decided to pierce my nose, DIY style. Several bottles of beer later and I applied an ice pack to the right nostril while smearing the whole area in Preparation H, which numbed the skin. A safety pin culled from behind a couch did the piercing, and from then on my right nostril was the proud owner of a gold stud, which grew up to be a silver ring when college started back. Presumably, by doing this I was rejecting conformity, although if I had my time back, I’d much rather have a scar-free nostril than rail against the ‘system’.

My social thinking was all skewed, confirmed when I had to come back early from the States to repeat one of my subjects, which, appropriately enough, was sociology. Without having handed in any course work, I had gotten a respectable 23 per cent in my end-of-year exams. Not quite Noam Chomsky, but not a bad return for having missed every Friday morning seminar since the academic year began. I repeated and got the exam and was back in time to take my place on the annual rag week booze cruise. My only other memories of that rag week were dressing up as a student nurse for the Rags Ball and being thrown out of the nightclub for doing lines of speed in the female toilets.

Of my three years as an undergraduate I only have selective memories. I’m slightly wary of writers (James N. Frey take a bow) who can recall whole episodes involving their past drunken or drugged selves. If you indulged enough, then you shouldn’t be able to remember! My attitude to drugs was that I could take or leave them. Invariably, of course, I took them, mostly cannabis and the occasional brew of magic mushrooms, later on ecstasy, cocaine, MDMA, acid and speed. There were some fellow students who entered Sir Henry’s nightclub in first year only to re-emerge years later, 3 stone lighter and a lot more paranoid. I exposed myself to the dance scene in limited bursts, maybe every second Sunday night or on bank holiday weekends. I still had a fear of what drugs could do, and had seen several Ennis natives whose lives were destroyed young enough for me to realise I needed to creep up slowly on this particular animal.

There were exceptions, of course, including a heavy weekend in Amsterdam with a trainee doctor who was always up for a night out. We were staying with a Canadian friend, and had partied through the night in anticipation of the weekend’s delights in the Dutch hedonistic oasis—Amsterdamaged, as we liked to call it. The three days there are now distilled in my mind to about four or five freeze frames. On day one we sourced herbal Ecstasy tablets and some cocaine from a local street chemist. The cocaine had the same effect as an anaesthetic from a dentist, albeit with a splitting headache thrown in for good measure. We got it into our heads that the herbal pills were having no effect so doubled up on dosage. The rest, as they say, is a bit of a blur. I remember ending up at a squat party in a former embassy somewhere and walking past neo-Nazis training their alsatian to attack members of the public. ‘Come to Amsterdam and suppress the memories for a lifetime’ should be the Dutch Tourist Board hook.

Other memories flash back every now and then—getting hit by a car outside Sir Henry’s nightclub while on Ecstasy, limping off before the Guards arrived and spending the remainder of the night rolling around the Mardyke Cricket Pitch. Generally I felt socially awkward and found getting drunk or stoned a way to sidestep those feelings. I never would have seen it that way; at the time I was just doing whatever everyone else was.

——

Knuckling down in the second year of my studies, I finished the year with a respectable result, enough to suggest I had a shot at a decent degree. I was living with a girl at the time, a childhood sweetheart from the end of our schooldays in Ennis, and the stability of that relationship had an impact in limiting multiple benders in any given week. I had vague notions of becoming a teacher, so it was important to make some bit of an impression with second year’s grades in order to secure the postgraduate course. In the main, I felt academically slight. Perhaps it came from being surrounded by a new intellectual discourse. Before attending university, my reading was mainly limited to Stephen King novels and whatever was demanded on the Leaving Cert curriculum. Hopkins appealed, so too Kavanagh, and on a personal level, I could relate to Othello’s emotional frailty. I didn’t know much about New Romanticism, right and left political argument, postcolonial theory or Bob Dylan. I probably couldn’t even have told you what the main difference between Communism and capitalism was. I struggled with the apostrophe (still do!), and given that I was the first in my family to go down the academic road, I found it difficult to relay my experiences when home. Dislocated, both physically and psychologically, would be how best to describe it. Ours wasn’t a bookish house in any event, which isn’t a criticism, just a statement of fact. I was often struck by the reality that my dad worked hard in those early years to be able to keep the family finances on track and send me to college. Yet, the more time I spent in university, the further away from him in outlook and experience I got. We get on well now, but it took time, and in a way, and I guess this is the same for many parents of his generation, he was enabling the distance between us by virtue of the fact he was doing an honourable thing and financing my studies. Zadie Smith put it best when writing on her relationship with her father, and the feeling of alienation brought about by furthering her studies—‘It was university wot dunnit,’ she remarked.

At the time I could also be desperately socially awkward (what Irish person isn’t at some level?). Walking into lecture theatres late was a major ordeal, and so too was walking past groups of colleagues in the bar and having to speak in small tutorial groups. It came from a feeling of inadequacy which would later be suppressed by the faux camaraderie of the bar scene. Back then, though, I was unsure and idealistic. Later in this book, Des Bishop talks about the generations of shame and guilt Irish people carry around with them, of how much of a wounded society we Irish are. Perhaps there was some of that, an inner feeling that here I was in university, debating the constructs of Beowulf or Banville’s Book of Evidence, when only a few generations earlier my ancestors struggled for their very existence. Both my parents’ families were from rural areas of west Clare, and would have had to contend with eviction, famine, war, and religious extremism. Perhaps, and not to get too Jungian on you here, that collective energy needed venting at some point, or was passed through the generations needing an outlet. Or maybe I was just unlucky—maybe I had emotional issues I didn’t fully address and they hid like dormant fleas, waiting for the right personal habit to come along which they could attach themselves to and achieve liberty of sorts. Whatever the reasons, my drinking during those years changed and became more and more a badge of who I was and how I thought.

——

In final year I managed to rediscover quite a bit of self-discipline and from January that year onwards, I socialised very little. Course work was going well, complemented by two drama courses, which allowed for performance-based modules. Studying history sparked an interest in Irish land agitation, specifically the west Clare region where my ancestors had farmed. For my final year undergraduate thesis I focused on the Vandeleur Estate, part of the Kilrush Union, where a series of evictions occurred in the mid-nineteenth century. Halfway through, a history professor took me aside, enquiring whether or not I had thought of a career in academia. Of course I hadn’t but said it would be something that appealed. And why wouldn’t it, with the chance to spend a few more years milling about campus, living the student life? It became clear during the final year that I was headed for a good result, and still with vague notions of teaching at the end of it. I fell in with a good group, where academic competition was high, and we all strove for the elusive first-class degree, egging each other on. After the exams I headed to Edinburgh for a summer, where my drinking returned to pre-final-year levels, although this time there was an edge to it not present in previous years. Whiskey, and more specifically Canadian Club, became my drink of choice; I often downed shot after shot between rounds or on my own when no one else was looking. It enabled more erratic behaviour and blackouts became more and more frequent. I worked in a Mexican restaurant, usually in the mornings and evenings. In the afternoon, in fact every afternoon, I went to the Green Tree Bar, and found camaraderie there among the regulars at the counter, which appealed to me throughout my drinking life. Every day, the regulars participated in the Channel 4 game show ‘Countdown’, with military-style concentration—whoever got the conundrum was assured free drinks for the rest of the evening. I got it once, and it was a great day indeed. I longed to return to America and one night/early morning came home from an all-day whiskey session, packed my bags and informed my room-mates, including my girlfriend at the time, that I was heading for Boston and would see them all at Christmas in Ennis.

I had £45 and a passport in my pocket and it was close to 2 a.m. The cab driver dropped me to the departures terminal and wished me luck. A national airline had a flight to Boston the next day, so I queued at the check-in desk and waited for it to open. My plan was to tell them I had received very bad news from Amerikay, and that it was imperative I got on the next flight. To me, the plan was foolproof. While waiting for the desk to open, I fell asleep, and awoke several hours later, in the airport, with no recollection of how I got there or why I was queuing for a flight to Boston. A taxi ride later and I was back in bed, trying to sleep off the rest of my hangover, before my flatmates had got up for breakfast. Boston would have to wait.

The summer’s drinking was fuelled by a variety of odd jobs—handing out flyers at nightclubs, waiting tables, working in factories. At the start of the summer, a few others and myself managed to bluff our way onto the British welfare system, and once every two weeks we took a bus to a local employment office to claim £88 benefit. This had usually been drunk by the time we arrived back to our rented accommodation.

The feelings of social awkwardness present since early adolescence accelerated during this period. I felt like I had something to say, but couldn’t find ways of saying it. I never fully fitted in with whatever group I happened to be with, whether it was the daily drinkers on the Cowgate or the artists taking part in the Festival. I leaned on alcohol more and more as a means of unlocking social situations, of easing myself into company. It was a self-confidence thing. Perhaps it’s an Irish thing. Every Sunday night we headed to Taste, a weekly event at the Honeycomb nightclub, and began experimenting more with Ecstasy. One, maybe two pills at most. The atmosphere was part hedonistic, part quasi-spiritual, summed up by the fact that doormen searched you down on arrival and then hugged you afterwards! I had vague notions that I should be part of some creative group—an actor, maybe, or a writer. The Dublin actor Mannix Flynn was in town that summer with his one-man show Talking to the Wall, and afterwards in the bar over vodkas and orange juice he got me thinking politically. The acting seed was planted in my head. Mainly, though, I honed my skill as a drinker. Scottish society welcomed the daily drinker into its open arms—every night there was a party, or even a quiet night in with plenty of stimulants.

The night of my twenty-first birthday was one of the first when I began to eye alcohol suspiciously. A party had been organised to celebrate my coming of age, and I left early, whiskey fuelled, with a regular in the bar where I was working. I fell out of her bed, got up to go to the toilet and for some reason answered her phone, which was ringing. On the line was her boyfriend.

The rest of the summer was like that—chaotic and shambolic. I was becoming paranoid and increasingly erratic, and began a relationship of sorts with someone I shouldn’t have begun a relationship of sorts with, if you know what I mean. My final exam results arrived in August and the hard work and abstinence had paid off. I was a few percentage points off a first-class degree, and had my choice of postgraduate courses. This further vindicated a hedonistic lifestyle. I now had an academic base to my drinking. I was Behan and Baudelaire all rolled into one. To celebrate I had half a Guinness with a shot of Canadian Club nestling in it and lit a £2 cigar. As Paul Calf noted, ‘You can’t buy class.’ The next night I took my first acid trip, and it was one of those great nights when the entire world was all right. Shop aisles moulded into one, pots and pans danced Disney-like across kitchen floors, roses smiled and winked as I looked out in the morning. A good friend’s tooth fell out, and left traces as it flew across the room. The comedown was in a downstairs jazz joint, my only memory of which is singing ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ with the band and waking up in someone’s doorway.

By this stage the signs of what were to become major issues in my life were present. Drink was beginning to tease my morality, mess with my finances and lead to behavioural changes. It led to extreme paranoia in relationships, to unfaithfulness, and blurred the lines between the right thing to do and the wrong. Things like getting sick in a friend’s apartment and walking out the door next morning, not bothering to clean it up—that’s a sign. Drinking on my own all day and night and walking home bare-chested, shouting at passersby—another sign. Not keeping in touch with family except when finances were low—all indications of behaviour to come. It’s difficult sometimes to relay the effect alcohol can have on you to another person—no one really knows the anguish and torment which swirl around in the head of a developing problem drinker. All society sees is the bon vivant, the engaging, entertaining you presented outwardly. It’s also sometimes not the big signs that point to problems. For example, I once went a year not calling my grandparents—partly because of shame, and partly because, well, alcohol makes you self-obsessed. To someone on the outside of my life, outside my environment, that might not sound like a hanging offence. But all my summers were spent in part on my grandparents’ farm, and most Sundays we visited. To suddenly not keep in contact—it was unexplainable behaviour. There were no arguments that led to my communication breakdown, just a total acceleration of self-serving obsession. With one grandparent left alive now, I look back on that period horrified. It still rankles with me. It might not be the destitute-on-the-streets story alcoholism sometimes results in, but to me, if you had told me years earlier that I would ignore family for a year for absolutely no reason, I wouldn’t have believed it.

——

The history department in University College Cork, lured by the strength of my undergraduate work on land agitation in west Clare, offered me a Master’s scholarship, paying my fees and giving me a monthly allowance. In return I would have to do some tutoring. I flicked a coin, literally, during one drunken afternoon drinking sangria on Cockburn Street in Edinburgh. Heads, I’d stay away from Ireland and maybe explore Europe more, or train to be a chef. I enjoyed the theatrics of commercial kitchens, if not the booze-fuelled comedowns after a night’s work. Tails, I’d return to Cork, make a fist of academia and carry on with student life. Nineteenth-century Irish history was big at the time, and I had delivered a good undergraduate paper on aspects of the land struggle, which I felt an emotional connection to. The coin landed on tails, and I headed for Cork and a world of student loans, scholarships, daytime drinking and declining health. Not that Edinburgh would have been much different. Within weeks of starting my postgraduate I quickly realised I was out of my depth. Part of the deal was that I would have to teach third-year history students some of the finer points of eighteenth-century Irish and nineteenth-century European social history. In effect, I was now responsible for about 14 per cent of 80 history students’ final year degree. As part of this process I would have to correct exam papers, complement course teaching, and be punctual and professional. I was 21 years old. My routine began to involve more and more daytime drinking, often with essays or course work deadlines missed, as I downed pints of Carlsberg accompanied by side orders of dry roasted peanuts in Cissy Young’s Bar off College Road. I applied for and got a student loan, which facilitated more daytime drinking, while the lack of supervision a research Master’s gives allowed me to go weeks, if not months, without any contact with my college supervisors. In essence, doing a postgraduate by research was all about giving me a licence to continue the exploits of college socialising for another two years.

My tutoring approach was shambolic—at one point I showed a video about the Irish land wars, which started 100 years after my course material finished—and this to students about to do their final year exams. Suffice to say, I wasn’t exactly CS Lewis developing lifelong friendships with impressionable young minds eager to mine my intellect. During these years I had fewer and fewer ties with Ennis——cTLC’’