Wasted

by Brian O'Connell

  But self-isolation is a danger, particularly in Ireland, where the pub, or more specifically alcohol, still plays such a central role. It’s one of the reasons why AA meetings often become such a huge social outlet for some people in recovery. In many ways, they’re recreating the best aspects of the pub in a dry setting. Compulsive 12-steppers or ex-addicts addicted to recovery, they exist, sure. When I rang Tabor Lodge and told them of my decision not to continue with weekly counselling and AA meetings, I remember them telling me it was the first step on the road to relapsing. They have to say that—it’s a blanket approach. I get it. But deep down I think I knew that this was one I needed to work through on my own.

  Sometimes, when I am out, I’m met with curiosity—the journalist who doesn’t drink. Other times people feel self-conscious around me, and feel like I’m judging them purely by virtue of my sobriety. Maybe I am. And maybe it’s hard not to. I find weddings hardest and least fun of all. There’s a hedonistic attitude at weddings in Ireland. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been at a wedding where people at the table will tell each other how drunk they’re going to get. There’s the church, the meal, a few speeches and then anything goes and conversation slips out the side door unnoticed. Perhaps it’s because weddings are in a way a display of deep affection or romantic emotion and as a nation we need to get inebriated in order to be comfortable around those types of feelings, expressions and emotions.

  Visiting relations in Galway recently, we went looking for a local bar to watch a soccer match. Entering the bar, early on a Sunday, one of the locals was fairly well on, wearing a knitted Aran hat and conducting several conversations at once. He’d clearly had a late one the night before and had an early start that morning to help recuperate. It turns out he was, until recently, the local bachelor in the village, who held up the bar most nights. He had his own seat at the bar, one of those kings-of-the-counter types. One night a lady sat on his seat while he was in the toilet. ‘That’s my seat,’ he said on his return, and they hit it off. (Try turning that into an opera.) Anyway, they got married, and one of the conditions of the marriage was that he kept a handle on the drinking. The day we met him was the day after his wedding. It was 12.30 p.m. on a Sunday and he was completely inebriated. Not exactly a precursor to wedded bliss, is it?

  ——

  My drink of choice these days is a sparkling water. If it’s the weekend, I might ask for a dash of lime. You know, push the boat out. If people ask, I normally say I used to drink but was in danger of becoming a cliché, so I knocked it on the head. I sometimes go months without going to a bar. It’s not that I consciously avoid the social scene, just that I have other priorities in my life now. I have never gone to a disco since I got sober. I don’t see the point and have only been in late bars for afternoon coffee.

  At the heart of the Irish experience, there is a need to filter the way we experience the world, be it through drink or drugs. Why is that? We’re in danger of drinking ourselves into a national stupor. Reality alone is not enough, and issues of self-esteem, mixed with our newfound arrogance and recent deflation, have created an Ireland on an endless bender. My payback for living in this Ireland is to leave it as much as possible. In other countries, no one can point to the person standing at the bar drinking a sparkling water and say for certain, ‘That’s the alcoholic.’ Can the same be said of Ireland? We have an all-or-nothing mentality that is playing itself out seemingly unchecked. Or perhaps I’m being overly sensitive, applying my own black-and-white relationship with alcohol to what should be a case of personal moderation for everyone. I’m more interested, though, in how Irish society copes with its problem drinkers. I’m interested in how they drink and why and what the consequences are. I started out on this book wanting to hear what the government is doing about it, what the health sector thinks and what happens in other countries. I want to hear how drinkers become drinkers, what make them tick and, for those who have given it up, how they find living in Ireland since getting sober. I was on a radio show recently and the researchers had gone onto the streets of Dublin to speak to people about drinking.

  They asked one girl, ‘Would you go out with someone who doesn’t drink?

  Her reply was ‘No way.’

  In how many other countries in the world would you get that type of response?

  Abuse of alcohol caused me to lose my way, but also allowed me to find out who I am. The way I viewed the world had been filtered from the age of 15 onwards through alcohol, so in a very real sense, giving it up meant a re-engagement with adolescence. Relationships, conversation, weekends, sex, love and living all had to be re-learned.

  I’d be lying, too, if I said I didn’t think about reintroducing alcohol to my life from time to time, although it’s rare. I counteract those thoughts by thinking back to when there was no real material or emotional buffer to prevent my drinking from becoming a problem. I didn’t really know how to be a parent. I didn’t know how to be a partner. I didn’t know how to make a living. I had no money and no home. Now I have all those things, and have a tight control over my life. So, surely, the logic goes that if I was to start having an occasional gin and tonic, or a glass of good wine with a nice meal, what harm could it do? It’s a debate not entirely resolved, except I think about what I have, and compare it to what I had, and don’t feel prepared to take the risk. I also don’t know what added benefit it would bring to my life. It might make certain social settings more informal, but it’s not my fault that we Irish rely so much on alcohol as a means of social interaction. It’s hard not to feel sometimes like I’m damaged goods or tainted stock or that there is an emotional lack at the core of my issues surrounding alcohol. Perhaps there’s some truth in that. Alcohol is a mood-altering substance. It helps numb experience, helps fertilise fantasy and alter behaviour. But whatever the reasons for my drinking getting out of control, I’m glad I went through that experience. It’s made me who I am today, to quote the cliché.

  I used to dread the thought of going on holidays in the early stages of my sobriety. To me holidays were all about a licence to start drinking earlier and for longer. And as for interacting with locals, or dealing with social groupings, forget it—I could never have thought it possible without some form of Dutch courage. Now, though (cue birdsong), I have a newfound confidence, am constantly fascinated by new cultures and experiences, and have the clarity of mind to process those experiences.

  In the last four years I have been all over the world, from eastern Congo to Mozambique, Kolkata to Tasmania. It’s ironic, but now I wonder how the hell did I ever travel and take in another culture while I was drinking? I can’t imagine waking up with a hangover, trying to negotiate a foreign tourist trail or simply plan a day’s events. I’ve a newfound confidence now and am capable of a type of honest human interaction I never had before. I feel genuinely privileged. Relations with my family have never been better; I’m financially secure and personally content. More than that, though, I can look myself in the mirror again. In fact, I quite like what I see.

  Sure, life can still throw its curveballs, but I’m far better able to bat them away sans alcohol. Life is probably less extreme and more on an even keel these days. Are there times when I want to express the darker side? Sure. Because I spent so many years screwing up my career, or fumbling about trying to find one that suited me, I have a tendency to overwork now. It can become an obsession and I have to keep it in check. Genuinely, though, alcohol, or the pursuit of it, which for so many years was my raison d’être, rarely enters my head now. I feel like I’ve filed that aspect of my personality away, and, like I’ve said, look on it more as a lifestyle choice than a clinical or psychological one.

  Having said that, there are still tricky moments, and times when I can feel alienated by Irish society to such an extent that assimilation would appear the easier option. Travelling abroad also still brings its own problems, especially on media trips, with any amount of free drink on offer. The thoughts begin to creep back
. I could just have one final lash at it and no one would know. I wonder if I still have the same tolerance levels I had at the height of my drinking. It’s not like you can unravel all the good things in your life in a 24-hour bender, is it? So what harm would it be to have one final hurrah? The feeling is there also when I’m out with friends at a good restaurant and they labour over the wine choices before selecting a fruity little red or a crispy white vintage.

  I often compare my urges to that scene in the film A Beautiful Mind when Professor John Nash is attempting to recover from the delusions that have plagued his life. One hallucination, a little girl, still haunts him, and waits at the end of his college steps, arms outstretched, asking to be allowed back into his life. For me, alcohol is always there with its hands out, asking for one final embrace. I just choose to ignore it.

  Des Bishop, Comedian

  I was nineteen when I stopped drinking. I was probably about seventeen when I first said, ‘I don’t think I can actually drink.’ In between there were a few stopping periods and during those periods when I tried to go out and socialise it was really uncomfortable.

  In retrospect I was still trying to live a drinker’s life, just not drinking. It’s kind of miserable, really, plus I wasn’t making any new friends with like-minded interests. Back then, most of my friends were pretty much one hundred per cent focused on drinking. After nineteen, when I stopped properly, I did stop going out for a while, but only for three or four months. Then when I moved back to Cork and got some new friends from the non-drinking side of things, we started going out together. We established a new thing which was nightclubs.

  We went to nightclubs because we could dance all night and drinking didn’t really come into it. Drinking in a nightclub didn’t have the same allure as that nine o’clock in a smoky pub on a Saturday evening feeling. I guess that’s kind of alluring. We just wanted to dance and have a good time. There was something quite easy about not drinking and dancing all night.

  If you are to ask me what makes a problem drinker, well, there’s a massive industry trying to answer that! Everyone has their own opinion. I mean, there is a lot of alcoholism in my family—I won’t single out anyone—but generation after generation there’s buckets of alcoholics. I would say seventy-five per cent of my relations have said that they have a problem.

  My mother told me when I was fourteen that I was definitely going to become an alcoholic because she could see it already. This was after some evidence to suggest it was already happening, mind. She didn’t just take me aside out of the blue and say, ‘Son, you’re going to be an alcoholic’! I didn’t think much about it. It was one of the things going on around that time which led to me coming to Ireland.

  In terms of the big question, I know that it can be an energy thing. It’s kind of in families; whether it’s genetic or not I don’t know. With alcoholics or people who have a problem with drink, there is a lot of searching going on. Often they’re looking for something more than is on offer and they find a bit of relief in booze. That journey takes them to a dark place. Even if you take the booze out of it, that search, or lack of something within a person, gets passed on from generation to generation.

  Whether it manifests itself as shame, or some parent in middle-class families harbouring a kind of dysfunctional ambition, or the way you become overaware of yourself socially or the way that your family appears becomes the most important thing.

  All these things I find to be quite abnormal and unhealthy. There are all these sort of energies bandying around the place with people who are searching for something that is not on offer. Often people are trying to escape this sense that something is not quite right and I guess it comes out in so many different ways. Definitely with alcoholics and addicts, most of them would express something along the lines of growing up with the sense that something is not quite right.

  I definitely think in various different ways that’s the energy that gets put out in a house. No one is aware of it, and it’s not like parents decide, ‘Well, what I’m going to do, I’m definitely going to make my child feel bad for no reason whatsoever!’ It just tends to happen.

  The term ‘alcoholic’, in America people don’t have a problem with the word. Somebody who decides they drink way too much wine after their dinner and it is a problem in their lives can call themselves an alcoholic without any labelling going on. So for me, I don’t have a problem with the term. Then again I’m thirteen and a half years without drinking. I’m thirteen and a half years having discussions like this. I’m thirteen and a half years surrounded by people who have no problem calling themselves alcoholics.

  I went to Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous and I have stayed actively involved in those places to this day. I got a whole new rack of friends. The greatest thing is a lot of the people that I drank with disappeared, but a lot of them didn’t because after a while after I re-established myself as a human being. The people that were just genuine friends, and we weren’t just bound solely by drink, they’re all still good friends of mine today. I guess one of the ways I established myself is that I found a new life and new interests. More important, I really tried to challenge and remain vigilant around the things that were behind my drinking.

  In a way I agree with you that the term ‘alcoholic’ has become redundant because alcohol is not the problem; addiction is not even the problem. None of these things were actually the problem. The problem is, people have things running around in them that motivate their behaviour.

  When you take away the drugs and alcohol there are still other things that can creep up in your life that become a problem so I was constantly trying to be vigilant through all of those things. I lead a pretty normal life—it’s not like every day I’m trying to focus on whether or not a situation is a negative or positive thing in my life. But, at the same time, I don’t take for granted that I have a tendency towards taking things a little bit too far, for whatever reason, it just naturally kicks up in me. So I have to remain on top of all those things.

  But also, without realising it, my lifestyle is completely different. I find that for many people in their thirties, their lifestyle is a little more mature and less centred around going out and getting pissed anyway.

  I was never really exasperated living in Ireland sober, mainly because I very quickly established a new lifestyle which had nothing to do with the pub. When we went to the pub, it was to meet girls and that was the only reason. We quickly discovered that life doesn’t have to be catered around the pub at all. People always say, ‘Is it not really hard in Ireland?’ I say no, you only perceive it as being hard because you don’t look at all the other options, and that comes from social conditioning.

  Having said that, though . . . I love going to the pub now. Sometimes there’s nothing I like more than being down in west Clare. There’s a great pub in Lisdoonvarna that does hot smoked salmon. I can sit in there and have a cup of tea—I’ll even talk to an auld fella at the bar who probably is an alcoholic (none of my business). I love that too, but at the same time it is one of many things and places I would go to. It’s easier now anyway; there are so many more cafés.

  When people think about a social life they still often think about going to the pub. I think there are definitely greater options there now. We never thought we needed more options in those early years of not drinking. We drove down to west Cork and did stuff all the time, like going down to the Buddhist retreat centre, and did different things. And then you meet new people and you realise there so many things you can do.

  I have to say now, I’m touring around all the time and I’m on my own looking for places to go and hide away for an hour or two, there’s definitely more cafes. Even in pubs, you’ll always get a decent bit of lunch and you’ll always get a real cup of coffee now, whereas fifteen years ago it was always the instant type in the cup. Now it’s decent coffee and probably more comfortable seats and the sense that fifty per cent of the people are there to read the paper and have a sandwich and
not to get inebriated.

  I think sometimes people have a foggy notion of nostalgia. People are constantly going on about how it wasn’t like this twenty years ago and all of that. I came here in 1990 and I remember being blown away by the social life. I loved the drinking but was too young to get access to bars. When I went away with my cousins to parties, I was blown away by the amount of drinking, especially by adults.

  I couldn’t believe the amount of drinking they were all doing. It was a million miles from what I had I grown up in. My parents didn’t drink, but even the Americans that I knew that did drink—never would they have ever been that inebriated around their children. There were ferocious amounts of drinking in Ireland when I came here. And people say it wasn’t like this years ago, and I would say, ‘What are you talking about?!’

  They say young people didn’t drink, but that’s because they didn’t have any money. They couldn’t wait to do what the adults were doing. I sometimes question this nostalgia around the healthiness of drinking—there was so much darkness in Ireland in that time that people were trying to escape that I would question those memories.

  I remember when I was in school someone came in to talk to us about booze. But it’s usually the same thing, some alcoholic tells their story. A lot of the time teenagers can’t identify with that. I mean, it worked out for me as I remember going up to the guy when I was eighteen and saying, ‘Take me to an AA meeting!’

  I was particularly bad. Really what you need to do is to get it into kids’ heads that later on if it starts to become a problem they might think about what they learned at an earlier stage.

  When I went in to the priest in our school after the alcoholic came to talk to us, I asked to leave early on the following Friday to be able to go to an AA meeting. He said, ‘But you can’t be an alcoholic, you’re too young.’