I always talk about my story every time I’m asked, because I think it’s so important to talk about the reasons people drink rather than the drink and the curse of the drink and all that. I rarely met an alcoholic or drug addict that hasn’t been through some awful sort of emotional pain. I think a lot of kids nowadays suffer from emotional abandonment. Their parents may have been slaves to the work and acquiring money and houses and careers, and I am so happy I was okay when rearing my first three children in that I spent time with them at home. I do think that had some sort of good effect for what was to come.
I would say with my generation, eighty per cent of the children in my class were beaten either at school or home. And I think it’s for different reasons people drink now. I don’t think anyone has any core beliefs now any more. It’s hard to find it. I have five children from the age of thirty-three to twelve so I have an array of teenage experience in my life. The ones now have fuck-all. I think kids are left a lot to their own devices. I don’t think there’s any guidance and I know I didn’t do it with my children. I didn’t know what it was to be a mother and a parent. I didn’t know good parenting. I learnt parenting skills, though, and really took responsibility, and my life has changed completely because of it.
Chapter 5
The Forgotten Irish
‘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, y
ou’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.
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