Wasted (11 page)

We continued to chat about changing traditions. The owner pointed to the fact that a neighbouring village had 20 bars at one point and is left with four now.

‘I think the pub will always be there in rural Ireland,’ he said, ‘but the numbers are declining and I can see a lot more closing. Pubs in the real country areas on their own
find it very hard. The Guards are closing in on them and locals have to go to a place where they can get a lift home or villages where they can walk.’

Not one to stand still, the bar has started to do food this year in an effort to broaden out their daytime trade. ‘You have to move on with the times, definitely, and food really is a must
if you’re going to keep the people, even for a funeral or anything like that. You feel that if you don’t [there’s] a danger that the local trade could be lost because
they’ll go somewhere else. In Ireland our culture is very much pub orientated and I enjoy it. Having said that, you don’t get the big functions like you used to get years ago. Think
about christenings, for instance, and only a small minority now come in and have a function.’

The demographic of the daytime drinkers in the bar was very much bachelor and Irish, with few women and fewer still foreign nationals. I remarked to the owner that it seemed out of step with the
changing culture outside, of the new multiethnic Ireland which has emerged. He then told me a story that happened a few months earlier.

‘I had an experience with a guy who had a room rented upstairs. He was training to be a doctor and was from eastern Europe. He worked as a stable lad for a trainer over the road. A very
nice fellow, and he told me his story and showed me pictures of his wife and his child. He was still far off becoming qualified as a doctor but he ran short of money and he wanted to spend three
years here to make enough money to build his house and finish college. So he was on his second year here and he went home for Christmas and his wife was to come back with him and the child. He was
at home for a month when he came back. I think his wife wouldn’t come back—she wanted him to come home but he knew another year or two would see him through. So he had money saved up
and he started drinking a lot, bottles of vodka and so on. Maybe he was depressed at being up there without his family.

He was a very nice chap, a young lad, maybe twenty-seven or twenty-eight. You wouldn’t get foreigners in here that often. Him and a friend would come in and play pool and so on and have a
few beers. But they started drinking heavy upstairs and you’d see him drinking bottles and carrying empty ones over to the bottle bank. It was beer and spirits mostly they drank. The only big
spirit-drinkers we would have were after funerals or something, when fellas would have a few shots. But this lad just got into a routine of drinking and was buying it locally in shopping centres.
He went on for months, and one day, he just fell down up there and died. He actually died there. He drank himself to death. We put a few quid together to get his body home.’

I found the story quite shocking. When I first visited the bar, weeks earlier, one of the regulars had died the weekend before and there was a post-wake of sorts happening. The man who died had
cancer, I think, and other health complications. Every week the bar owner would take him out of hospital and bring him down to the bar for a drink. He had gone from being a solid drinker to barely
being able to hold two pints towards the end. It was my first introduction to the bar—locals talking with fond memories of this man who drank with them, who worried with them and who, by his
presence, allowed them to continue their lives beside the counter. And now he was dead and no one was making a link between the unhealthy lifestyle of the daytime drinker and his premature
death.

To be honest, I found the whole scene quite depressing. Not that it is in any way unique—bars all over Ireland have similar scenarios, and I guess at least with the bar I visited there was
a conscience at work behind the taps.

That evening the owner’s wife invited me for dinner. We sat down for a chat in the living room of their large home, on a gated site across the road from the bar. Try as I could to suppress
the thoughts, I was struck by the probable dichotomy between the landlord’s home and that of some of his customers. Many of them, I imagined, slept in weeks-old sheets, tin-can-boiled eggs
the extent of their culinary exploits. In contrast, the owner’s home was well kept, family orientated, spacious and comfy. Not that it was his fault that he had done all right over the years.
He doesn’t have the problem. But the thought struck me that drink provided him with a nice family home and environment, whereas for many of his customers, it broke up what families and homes
they had.

His wife told me she had worked in an office until her husband’s illness forced her to take a career break. Now she does the morning shift in the bar, dispensing the morning dosage to
sickly patients. She brought an outsider’s eye to the daytime trade and her preconceived ideas on the type of people who drink during the day had changed dramatically since taking over the
morning shift.

‘I worked in a bar years ago, before I ever got married, but only started working back behind the counter a while ago. It’s only now I’m getting used to the daytime crowd.
Before, I would . . . only have worked when we were really busy and it was nighttime and you’re hardly talking to people, just throwing out the drink to customers. I used to hate the idea of
daytime work. But now that I have been in there I got to know the people and actually I enjoy it. I really enjoy their company. Some of them are very witty and I guess I take a different view of it
now.’

Reflecting on Irish culture, we got chatting about the extent to which a problem drinker can be assimilated into Irish society before being found out. Or, if he has been found out, he is carried
along by the crowd and it’s not seen as a big problem. ‘It’s looked on as an acceptable thing to get pissed in Ireland and nobody really is going to say anything to you. People
talk about it and say things like “I got hammered last night on twenty pints” very openly. On Mondays, you see the guys coming in and talking about their weekend and they don’t
see it as a problem. In rural Ireland, what do you do if you’re not going to the pub drinking?

‘I think, especially, men living alone use the pub for company. What other social outlet do they have? If they’re men of a certain age, and they’re not into sport or gone
beyond it and don’t have a partner, where are they going to go to meet people? There aren’t very many places. Most of our clientele have no other outlets, I would say. If you are a
farmer, for example, and don’t have a workplace, or you might be working with one other guy or driving a digger all day, what are you going to do for a social outlet, to meet
people?’

That idea of community, which the owner had remarked on earlier, is something fast disappearing in rural Ireland. From declining corner shops to voluntary sports, the individualisation of Irish
society is fuelling changing social trends. Perhaps this is why the problem drinker is now more noticeable and a lot less camouflaged by the rest of drinking society. During the Celtic Tiger years
especially, not as many people were into hanging about bars all day long when there was a few handy bob to be made. Others were determined to have their Chardonnay on their own decking, no matter
how cold it got. They had new kitchens and stereo units to show off, in houses which they were paying through the teeth for.

‘One guy who lived in the village, and was in his thirties, used to come out four or five nights a week. The Guards had been putting people off the road all week and I think maybe three
people had been stopped at one point. It was a Tuesday night, one of the quietest I ever put down, and there was one guy in the lounge and one in the bar. This local said, “For Christ’
sake, I come out to meet people, this is my social outing!” He likes a few drinks but mainly he comes out to meet people. But the other side of that, of course, is that it can be a problem
when that becomes a way of life and you are used to meeting people every night.

‘For some people, they might have three drinks and come in to meet the lads. The core group of drinkers are like a mini-family—they don’t have any other person to talk to
besides themselves. Sometimes the conversation is quite superficial; they’re having a laugh or the craic and chatting about their day and that. They’re quite connected in a way and
there is a friendship there. They would look out for each other. I only see that now and I wouldn’t have seen that before I was working. Nighttime drinking is different because couples are
out and so on. Any of the daytime guys around at night would be chatting to lots of different people around them and it’s a different conversation at nighttimes. The type of person who
becomes a problem drinker is hard to classify—I think a lot of the time these people are lacking in self-confidence and it’s a crutch rather than enjoyment—it’s something
they actually need. They need to have about four or five drinks before they’re even comfortable in a social situation. That’s not the case with everybody but with some of them. I do
think a lot of them are very timid at the back of it. They can’t actually function socially without the drink.’

I ask the same question I asked the owner—does she feel she is conflicted and fuelling the problems of many of her regulars by supplying them with alcohol?

‘There is a conflict there, to be honest with you. My husband would look after a lot of guys. He would cut down on the spirits they were drinking or make sure they get home all right or
whatever. But, say the guy we don’t serve spirits to, he goes in and gets them in town and then he comes back to us at certain times of the day. People are going to get drink if they want to,
no matter where. But you do sometimes feel like saying stuff. Like when guys are telling you their problems. One guy suffers from mental health issues, and you nearly feel like saying, “Can
you not see it’s the drink?” That’s not my job, in a way. My job is to listen to them and they don’t want me to tell them that. I can opt out. You can kind of bring up the
subject. There was a lady who used to drink in there all day Monday. Her child was in the house having come back from school and would often beg the mother to come home. I used to say to my
husband, “How can you stick it?” Having the child in the bar pleading for the mother to come home and she wouldn’t budge. As it happens, now she drinks at home all the time. So
people will do that regardless. There was another guy who used to come into us and he had quite a drink problem. He was a young married guy. His wife eventually rang the Guards and he was warned
not to be around drinking and driving. He just moved on to another village. The sad part of that is that the Guards would have said he was violent to her when he went home and we never would have
seen that side of him in the pub. He moved on to another place and didn’t solve his problems.

‘I remember another guy and his wife rang my husband and said, “Would you do me a favour and just bar him for one month?” He said, “I will.” So when he came in as
usual my husband said, “Sorry you’re barred for one month.” He said “Fair enough,” and after the month, the wife was my husband’s best friend. She said she
didn’t know where he was or how he was coming home. He still drank, so there’s a way of being with people and of handling situations. I would have been quite removed from that when I
was working in the office; now I can see the whole story and you do get attached to people. There are very few coming in that I do not like. Most of the people you’d love if they’d sort
out their problems, but they’re not going to solve them in the pub and I don’t think a publican is going to sort their problems either.’

One thing I noticed in my time at the bar was very few under-25s were drinking with the regulars or in their own groups. The normal rites of passage in a rural village, whereby youngsters would
be brought into the bar in their late teens for a drink, seemed to be missing. What this meant in effect was that those youngsters in the village drinking were doing so away from adult supervision.
Many had told me that drugs were now a feature of village life, and with cheaper drink available in off-licences and supermarkets, the current generation were turning their backs on a traditional
night out. Back seats of Honda Civics had become their lounge bars.

‘We would have some people in their twenties come in,’ said the bar worker, ‘but they generally come out at weekends. They might come in for a few drinks and then go to town
and go clubbing or whatever. The eighteen to twenty-one age group don’t come in, really. They are drinking but they don’t come in to us. They’re mainly doing drugs. There’s
only one guy in the village that comes in for a pint from that age group and the rest of them are all doing drugs. They smoke weed and are buying drink in places like Lidl and drink in cars and do
whatever drugs they’re doing. One of the guys, a father of one of them, was saying, “I wish they would come in because I’d know what they’re doing.”

‘When they do come in, it’s all shots and vodka. We notice on long weekends or nights of parties or big nights such as Stephen’s Night and that, when they do come in, they go
through huge amounts of vodka. It used to be all those alcopops. The way I see them drinking is that they start off pretty okay. They might be having a bottle of Smirnoff Ice or
WKD
or Bulmers, and then it would come a certain time in the night and it’s shots. They would get through a serious amount. Just “One, Two, Three,” and go.
They’d spend huge amounts. Vodka and Red Bull is the big thing at the end of the night.

‘To be honest, girls are more into the shots than the guys. The guys still actually drink pints but at the end of the night they will have a vodka and Red Bull. They might do a few shots
but with girls the object of the game is to get as many shots as you can into you if they’re going clubbing or whatever. It’s a ridiculous way to drink and a lot of the time you pour
more stuff down the sink after. What I see now, that I never saw before, is that people will say, “Can I have three vodkas and a Red Bull?” And you return with three glasses and
they’ll say, “No, can I have a pint glass and throw in the three!” We would never have drank like that. Nobody would even have had a double! The pub experience is central to Irish
life, though, and I would like to think it’s safe enough for another generation. We hope, anyway!’