Wasted

by Brian O'Connell

  The nightclub sector has noticed fundamental shifts in drinking patterns over the last decade. Whilst typically, clubs are now aimed at the 18–35 age group, many have installed so called ‘VIP’ rooms to cater for those of an older age. Late bars have prospered among this age group, with brighter lighting, lower music and a more relaxed environment, and less emphasis on dancing and more on continuing drinking. It is estimated that up to 3,000 late bar licences now exist nationally.

  ‘In the 1990s, if you wanted do go anywhere past pub hours, you had to go to a nightclub and there were queues in every nightclub as a consequence. To be honest, businesses didn’t have to put a whole lot of imagination into their product; they really just had to open the doors. If you look at the average club now, they are promoting their business hard, from websites where in some cases each actual night of the club will have its own Bebo page.’

  Having run a club in Temple Bar for eight years, O’Sullivan said the notion that everyone rushes to the counter for the last hour of drinking time, loading up on high volumes of shots, is simply not the case. He also says that the nightclub sector is often blamed unfairly for fuelling the binge drinking culture and points to other factors, such as the tendency for clubbers and pubgoers to begin the night at home with a few drinks.

  ‘In terms of drinking habits, it’s one of the misconceptions out there I have to deal with, especially from politicians when they talk about binge-drinking. As a sector, we know that sixty per cent of young clubbers will have one to three drinks at home before they leave. They will visit three or four bars on a night out, and have one or two drinks in each venue. We know also that the average consumer in a nightclub will have 2.7 drinks over the course of a night. So the nightclub is at the end of the course of the night’s drinking, and thirty per cent of it is done before they ever leave the house. That’s what is happening in Ireland today.’

  To back up his claims of how society scapegoats the nightclub sector, O’Sullivan makes reference to the Heaven nightclub in Blanchardstown. In 2007, security staff turned away 29,000 customers, mostly on Saturday nights, for being intoxicated. Many clubs in Temple Bar will turn away 200–300 people during the course of a night, which highlights the sheer scale of alcohol abuse being carried out, if nothing else. ‘Look, there is no value to us in letting customers into our venue who are intoxicated. All it takes is for someone who has had too much bump into someone and injure them and [it] could cost us thirty thousand euro.’

  The point the nightclub industry consistently hammers home is that the majority of drinkers are now fuelling up before leaving the house. This is borne out also by the experience of well known bar and club owner Paul Montgomery in Cork. Montgomery is the owner of one of the busiest nightclubs in Cork, Reardons, as well as several other late bar venues. He also owns a block of student accommodation, which he opened with a bar on the ground floor. Several months in, the bar was replaced with an off-licence. ‘He then sees this migration of young people from their apartments, bypassing the five bars he owns and going into nightclubs for a dance,’ says Barry O’Sullivan, ‘I think the nightclub offering will hold up better than the pub offering as we go deeper into recession. The pub offering can be reproduced in the home environment, where cheap drink can save money. You can get friends over and put on some good music and watch sports or whatever on plasma-style televisions. So the pub, now, can come to the punter in their sitting room. The downside to drinking at home, of course, is that you’re looking at the same faces all the time, and people still want to go out! And that’s where nightclubs will come in.’

  The sector is lobbying hard for closing times to be extended from the current 2.30 a.m. limit to 4 a.m. in Dublin, the reason being that the volume of nightclubs in Dublin is greater than anywhere else in the country. For instance, in Harcourt Street within 200 yards of each other are four prominent nightclubs—Copperface Jacks, D/Two, Krystle and Tripod. Between them they can churn 8,000 punters onto the street at the same time.

  The whole city of Cork has nightclub licences for 16,000 persons, showing the high density of clubbers catered for in Dublin. Also the sector is looking for government to introduce permits which would recognise the difference between normal bars and nightclubs—currently no such legislation exists. ‘The Guards have come to realise that restricted trading hours don’t lead to an improvement in public order,’ says O’Sullivan. ‘Our thinking is that putting everyone on the streets at the one time creates problems.’

  One gets the feeling, though, those problems exist regardless.

  ——

  A more recent development in terms of Ireland’s drinking history has been the high number of pub closures over the past decade. Reports estimate that somewhere in the region of 1,500 pubs have closed over the last six years, or almost 10 bars a week. The drinks industry expect a further 9,000 jobs to be lost in the industry in 2009, which could represent a 20 per cent reduction when taken along with 2008 figures.

  What trends are showing is that alcohol is leaving the main street and crossroads and becoming more and more an acceptable part of the home environment. The days when alcohol in the home consisted of a dusty bottle of sherry, taken out once a year when Aunt Vera arrived, seem a distant memory, oral fragments of another time. Now, weekly shopping baskets are as likely to have a six-pack of beer or shoulder bottle of spirits thrown in. A casual visit by a next-door neighbour, or a night in watching a movie, is enough to prompt the opening of a bottle of wine. In many ways we’re returning to a more medieval style of drinking, less evocative of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century forms. The changing nature of community has seen the closure of corner shops and post offices—not just in Ireland. With the erosion of community spirit, there is an increasing sense of loneliness and isolation in rural communities and anonymity in our urban ones.

  With alcohol, those feelings can be muted. The difficulty, too, in Ireland is one of perception. If Guinness really is good for you, and red wine proposed as the cure for a host of ailments, then what’s the big deal?

  Ireland, Inc., continues to hold Guinness dear as one of its flagship and defining brands, like the Cliffs of Moher or Kerrygold.

  Some of that is down to the pioneering efforts of that company over the last 250 years to provide for its workers and their families. Like Fr Mathew in Cork, benevolent deeds live long in the folk culture.

  Yet the fixation on Guinness in Ireland, the pride in the pint, and the closeness of branding between Ireland and a pint of the black stuff, suggest a deeper forging of identity between the people and its pint.

  The fact that the brewery remains our largest tourist attraction—not the areas of breathtaking scenery or the historical monuments, but a working brewery—says much about perceptions of Ireland abroad. Yet they are perceptions we have not denied. From American presidents to Ryder Cup captains, the thing to do in Ireland is to have a pint; only then can the visitor go truly native. Yet as trends change over the next decade, those perceptions will be challenged. The cost of the craic, both financially and socially to the state, may place pressure on the branding of Ireland, Inc.

  When the Ryder Cup was won on Irish soil in 2006, captains and players celebrated by downing pints of the black stuff in one gulp, to a TV audience of millions, all the while egged on by thousands of cheering spectators. Is that the epitome, the sum total, of what defines the national spirit?

  We think nothing of having a drinks company sponsor our national sports. Road traffic accidents on weekends and late nights spiral, accident and emergency wards struggle to cope with the casualties of alcohol abuse, and our few alcohol treatment centres are starved of funding. Still, though, the national image continues unabated and unaltered.

  As Bono might say, I don’t mean to bug you.

  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.