Wasted (14 page)
Authors: Brian O'Connell
Writing in 1845, Father Mathew felt in optimistic mood when he predicted the future generations’ relationship with alcohol. He wrote that ‘all the rising generations are being
educated in the strictest habits of temperance; and in a few years, drunkenness will be a thing passed away, never to return’.
Yet by September 1845 twice as many drunkards had been admitted to Cork Bridewell as in the same month in 1844. Faced with mounting evidence that his Temperance movement had not signalled the
death knell for Irish drunkenness, Fr Mathew conceded later that year that some drunkenness did exist, but was mostly limited to ‘poor sinful females’. Whether or not Fr Mathew would
have succeeded in having a long-term impact on the mindset among the Irish in relation to alcohol is debatable. From 1845 onwards, the Famine rendered his work largely secondary. In his fine study,
Father Mathew and the Irish Temperance Movement
, Colm Kerrigan questions whether Mathew achieved his objective of the rejection of drunkenness by mass society. Recent social history would
suggest he had little impact. Shortly before his death, in 1856, Mathew said the following:
‘We have turned the tide of public opinion; it was once a glory for men to boast what they drank, we have turned that false glory into shame; we have also given to the
timid temperance man, to the teetotaller, the protection of his virtue, and a large share of public sympathy for his sacrifice in the cause of the first of virtues, sobriety.’
Today, that passages sounds as it reads, a hopelessly idealistic desire for a better society with a more mature relationship to alcohol, which has yet to materialise. Still, flawed as he may
have been as a person, at least he tried.
——
Cut to today and Father Michael Mac Gréil is a man on a mission. As chairperson of the Irish Pioneer Association, he grew sick and tired of hearing talk that the
movement was in terminal decline. A few years back, he decided to visit every Pioneer centre in the country and assess the strength of the movement for himself. When I spoke to him, he had been to
over 900 parishes and visited somewhere in the region of 1,100 Pioneer centres. He is currently in the process of compiling a report to present his findings to the Irish Pioneer Movement. He says,
contrary to public opinion, the movement is still very much alive: ‘It is still there and I think we have to work on it and tend it more. I’m still getting a reaction to my visit and I
have a lot of information about the commitment. What people sometimes don’t understand is that the Pioneer movement is primarily a spiritual movement and educates by example. Of course we
also encourage sobriety.’
He admits there are ‘big challenges’ within the movement, yet feels that the Irish Pioneer Association still has a role to play in modern Ireland. At one time the Pioneer Total
Abstinence Association boasted half a million Irish members, proud to wear the Pioneer pin as a badge of self-sacrificial Catholic devotion. It drew members from every section of society, and could
summon over 80,000 people to outdoor rallies as recently as the 1950s. Yet estimates now put membership at less than 150,000, with uncertainty over how many of those are active Pioneers. Within the
movement itself, debate is beginning to happen. Many argue that its abolitionist stance has no future in modern Ireland, with some calling for moderate drinkers to be allowed join. Indeed, on its
website as part of its 2009 Lent campaign, the slogan was ‘Why not abstain or reduce your alcohol intake this Lent?’ It’s a very big ‘or’, showing that the movement
perhaps realises the strict abstinence game is up. There seems to be a new consensus emerging within the movement that abstaining from alcohol completely should be encouraged among under-18s, while
moderation should be the ideal for those aged over 18.
Fr Mac Gréil says that it is impossible to accurately comment on the strength of the Pioneers in Ireland, given that they are a largely unseen organisation. ‘We have always been a
discreet group and have never gone for publicity. We are a spiritual movement who offer up abstinence for the sins of intemperance.’ The image of a teetotalling membership, sternly
anti-drink, is somewhat misleading, he says, pointing out that being in favour of abstention doesn’t necessarily mean being anti-alcohol.
‘Our mission is sobriety in society, sure, but we’re not anti-drink. We may have had that image in the past, but we encourage people to drink in moderation. I mean, I am strongly in
support of well-run pubs and would hate to see anything happen to the rural pub in Ireland. It is a very important social institution, and in many senses a well-run pub is also an institution for
moderate drinking.’
Yet with alcohol such a pervasive facet of Irish life, the Pioneers are finding it increasingly difficult to get their message across. There are mitigating factors, argues Fr Mac Gréil.
‘I am totally opposed to the identification of sport and alcohol. I say to workers in Guinness, sure, support our national games, but do it anonymously if you believe in it so much. But what
they’re doing is using sport to promote their products, and that’s not promotion, that’s advertising a mood-changing substance in an area identified with youth. It’s a
disaster in this country.’
Fr Mac Gréil believes that the availability of alcohol in recent years in more outlets has fuelled our increasing dependence. ‘I think you have to study the false propaganda of the
alcohol industry, the manner in which they promote the subtle and psychological way to sexual satisfaction and athletic prowess through the use of their products. I think a lot of it is a big lie.
The big scandal at [the] moment is off-licence[s] and the supermarkets using alcohol as loss-makers to encourage people in [to] buy more. When you go into a supermarket now, alcohol is there like a
stack of turf.’
Historian Diarmaid Ferriter sees the decline of the Pioneer Association in Ireland within the broader context of social and religious change and points out the inherent contradictions in a
movement which promotes silent self-sacrifice on the one hand while simultaneously calling mass rallies and large-scale publicity events.
‘It’s interesting how it operates. It was meant to be a personal thing yet it thrives on mass participation through its structure and rallies and all that. I mean, personally I can
remember being taken out of school to take part in these mass gatherings. I’m sure people, too, will recall borrowing Pioneer pins when going for job interviews in order to make an
impression. It sounds pretty surreal now!’ Ferriter agrees that the movement has witnessed a gradual decline since the 1960s, and offers little hope of resurgence.
‘There’s little doubt that it’s been in decline for decades, much the same way as young people going to church has declined. I think there is a pressure on a whole generation
nowadays that would make it very difficult for them to be part of a movement like the Pioneers.’
While the Irish Pioneer Association admits hardship in attracting members in the 30 to 50 age group, it does claim something of a resurgence among those under 25. A rebranding of the youth wing
in the 1980s had a positive effect, with the emphasis now more on social outings than sacrificial penitence. Twenty-six-year-old Su-zann Scott, chairperson of the Young Pioneers, says that over
25,000 young people have joined the movement in recent years, and claims the association is having little difficulty attracting younger devotees. (The Irish Pioneer Movement is currently updating
their database but feels membership may be closer to 18,000 currently).
‘For me being a Pioneer is not just about not drinking, it is a huge social outlet, with so many competitions and events organised every week. There is a real sense of belonging and it
works like having an extended family. That’s why I choose to be a Pioneer—I now have friends in every corner of Ireland.’ Scott says that modern Ireland is in need of the Pioneers
now more than ever and feels proud to be part of a movement focused on changing society for the better. ‘There is sacrifice and prayer involved, but we just want to try and promote peace and
harmony in the home and in general society. Ireland has the highest rate of binge-drinking in Europe, so the Pioneers have a huge role to play. I’m always proud of my Pioneer badge. The way I
look at it, I know if I never shame it, then it’ll never shame me.’
Visitors to Ireland such as Dunton Fynes Morrison, Sir William Petty and Arthur Young all give us descriptions of the drinking and drunkenness in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which
read like 250-year-old equivalents of Prime Time specials. From those accounts, the image and idea of the ‘Drunken Paddy’ emerged and went overseas. That image has been hard to shake
off, and in any event we haven’t tried too hard, culminating in everything from cartoons in the British press in the nineteenth century to modern-day us shows such as ‘The
Simpsons’, which rarely has reference to Ireland without the booze. Those stereotypes exist because those social connections to alcohol in Ireland exist over many centuries.
Long before glitzy advertising campaigns, drinking patterns in Ireland were abnormal. Our ancestors drank to take themselves out of the daily misery of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life.
Yet before that, they drank because of a lack of self-control and a romantic and sometimes religious attachment to mood altering. And yet we’re not always a weak-willed race—the
abstinence movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are evidence of a sobering of thought and maturing of attitude in Ireland towards excessive drinking and drunkenness. Today, those
movements struggle to hold onto their messages, and are looking for ways to adapt to the society they operate in, rather than vice versa. Moderation and reduction are the new buzzwords of the
Pioneer Movement, where activities and sober social outings are promoted above pious abstinence. But what chance had they? Every abstinence movement in Ireland has been destined to failure, doomed
by virtue of society’s longstanding relationship to alcohol. The makers of modern Ireland were as much barmen and brewers as they were poets and politicians. But our relationship to alcohol
through the last few hundred years is a complex one. Undoubtedly there have been long periods when consumption levels have been excessive, such as the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and
early twenty-first century. But per capita consumption fails to take fully into account the numbers who abstained during those periods. Even today, 150,000 members of the Pioneer Movement is still
an impressive figure, given the decline of the Church and religious movements in the past decades. As Elizabeth Malcolm points out, ‘Much attention, both serious and frivolous, has been
devoted to the drunken “Paddy”, beloved of the popular press and music hall. But the drunken “Paddy” is only one side of the coin; the other side is the teetotal
“Paddy”.’
Moderate Paddy, though, has yet to reveal him- or herself.
I
n hindsight, the first time I ever got drunk I was about fourteen and drinking Babychams and I don’t remember a thing
after the night. I do remember getting a few Babychams into me but I don’t remember an awful lot after that. The next time I started drinking I was about nineteen, when I had my first
daughter, Aoife. I had the next child when I was twenty-one. I had three children by the time I was twenty-four, and didn’t drink during those years because I was really into my whole foods
and natural childbirth and breastfeeding. I think I had a bottle of Guinness once and a few glasses of wine, but it was okay to do that in those days.
My social drinking started when I was about twenty-six or twenty-seven. I started going out for pints when the kids were a little bit older and I started singing at the same time.
There was a lot of socialising around that. My worst drinking was the two years before I gave it up. Claire, my daughter who is seventeen now, was born. I hadn’t drunk for the pregnancy
because I had been in St John Of God Hospital before I got pregnant. I actually got pregnant on a weekend out from St John Of God Hospital. I thought I was completely cured because I had been off
it eight or nine months by the time I had my daughter. When she was six weeks old, I went up to Quinnsworth, as it was called at the time, and bought a bottle of vodka. Every single day, then, for
two years I drank an average of three bottles of vodka. I was hospitalised thirty-two times in those two years and ended up with a condition called metabolic acidosis. It landed me in intensive
care in the Mater during St Patrick’s weekend. I was critically ill with absolutely hours left to live and all I was thinking about was drinking again and how long would I be there for. At
that stage I had already had a miscarriage.
Drink with me was pints at that time. There are lots of photographs of me including a really famous one on the cover of a particular album with a pint of Guinness in front of me.
The second album also. I would sing with a pint of Guinness on stage, but really it was only pints at that stage. That was totally the image I was projecting. The first time I had a gin and tonic I
was thirty. I hung with people who were well known for it already in the trade, like the Pogues and Nick Cave and stuff like that. I remember once being interviewed for the New Musical Express
(
NME
) in England and the publicist or manager knew I had been drinking champagne the night before, so he asked if I had any champagne left. He suggested it would be a great
idea if I walked down with it in the morning. I said, ‘Ah ya no problem,’ and I did it. One of the other pictures they asked me to do was to lie down outside in the street with my head
in the double yellow lines in the road. What the fuck! I did it. I was a wild fucking woman with a vocabulary like the backside of a loo door and a voice like bleeding cherries. So I became known
for the boozy image.
I didn’t realise until the later years, and going into the Rutland Centre, how much damage I had done to my kids. Everybody I knew, all the mothers, at that time all drank at
weekends. I remember going to a bar called the Summit, when I lived in Howth, nineteen or twenty years ago. I’d [go] for a few pints in the evening after school, maybe a pint of lager or two,
and let the kids run around. Go home then and do the homework and then the dinner. And these are in normal times, now, and maybe later at night you’d walk down for a few more pints. It
wasn’t until I started buying drink for my house that I knew it was a problem, which I had never done up a certain period of my life. This was in the 1980s—maybe 1989.
I was abused horribly when I was a child and I done an awful lot of work in that area. It wasn’t until I accepted it that things began to ease. Looking back on my drinking, I
think there was no other way I could have coped. I used drink to hurt myself and it wasn’t until I realised how much I was hurting other people that I stopped, when I had some sort of decency
left in me. I was hurting myself because I was a bad, bad person.
That abuse had left me with an intrinsic self-hate. I used to say I was lower than lino, that I was a worm. I had felt like that since I was about seven. I had felt depressed, and
had attempted suicide. I was locked up in a nuthouse when I was sixteen. There was a fact there I hadn’t acknowledged. I’m not saying it was the reason I drank, but there was this
feeling of being worthless. It wasn’t until I addressed that that I could actually say goodbye to drink.
Now, I haven’t had a drink for about fifteen years. I had been to several treatment centres but the Rutland Centre was my salvation. I don’t know if it was the time or
circumstance; I was thirty-seven when I started there. I was so bad that I couldn’t go there from the hospital, and I wasn’t allowed home either. Nobody wanted me home. It was really
the end of the road, and it worked because even though I did initially think about ‘Will I ever be able to drink again?’ when I was laying on that hospital bed on my own. What prevented
it was the fucking shame of it and what I had done to my daughter Claire. I spent her second Christmas in an Accident and Emergency ward and they all came in to see me on Christmas Day. Her second
birthday I was down in a nuthouse and let out for the afternoon. The inability to connect with her was probably the most painful experience of my life.
I was listening to my three eldest children in the Rutland Centre every Wednesday when they had to come in and I never knew they felt so bad about me drinking socially. When they
were little, Eóin, my son, was saying how lonely he felt. Eóin is twenty-eight now. How lonely he felt when myself and the mothers I used to hang around with would throw them a
mineral and a bag of crisps and let them run around the car park up at the pub. He really felt lonely and felt scared. One time I drove home and he thought I was going to get them killed in the
car. I had to sit there and listen to that. And listen, also, to my daughter tell how she used to listen outside the bedroom. Because I used to drink in a spare room and I had a mattress on the
floor there and she used to listen out to see if I was alive. I slapped my daughter once, because she was pouring my last bottle of vodka down the sink. I got really angry with her and hit her a
belt. When you’re in treatment, and if you look at that shit every single week for six weeks and you have to listen to them saying it over and over again. I had a wonderful therapist there.
She was the greatest bitch on two feet and I hated her but she sorted me out! After the first family day in the Rutland, she asked me the next morning, ‘How do you feel?’ I said,
‘Oh, grand.’ And in front of everyone she started screaming at me. ‘How could you feel grand, because I listened to your kids yesterday.’ That’s when it started. They
were making me look at what I had done and it clicked with me. Yet I came out of the Rutland Centre and I went home and drank. I don’t remember what I drank but I do remember that my partner
found me passed out on the kitchen floor. I don’t remember how I got the vodka, or going for it. I phoned the Rutland Centre and went back out there straight away and did one-to-one
counselling, which lasted for a long, long time.
It was only then I started to address all the things I hadn’t told them in there, about me and what happened to me as a kid and how I had felt all my life. I was dealing,
really, with being ashamed for my kids when I was in there, and I hadn’t dealt with the shame of me.
I haven’t had any drink all my life since then.
When I came out, I hated everyone with drink. I hated them because I couldn’t drink with them. I was left babysitting a lot of the time while everyone went to the pub because
I couldn’t stand going to the pubs. I was very good friends with people who had children and we always had a social dinner on a Sunday and I began to resent people for drinking the first year
I was out. About three years on I was driving through Dalkey. In my past, I used to drink in the car an awful lot. I would buy drink and drink it in the car. A few times I drove into Dublin to the
early house near Pearse Station. I used to go and get drink also in the Spar in the morning. They would open at seven o’clock and a guy in there did me a favour and I’d buy a bottle of
port and down it before I called the kids for school in the morning. Nobody would know. My favourite tipple in the car was a bottle of rosé. I would put a straw into it and drink it. So one
day, I rang the Rutland Centre from a particular harbour which was one of my favourite drinking sites, and I pulled in the car. The car filled up with gin and tonic. I could smell Gordon’s
Gin. I could see the bottle, I could smell the ice and smell the lemon and smell the tonic water. I rang the Rutland and I said to my counsellor, Maura, ‘I’m never going to drink
again.’ I said to her, ‘Can I say that?’ She said, ‘You can, if you really want to.’ So I said, ‘I’m never going to drink again, never ever.’ And
that was it.
So I’m at peace with it now. I was in a very nice part of Italy doing a gig a few years ago and the promoter said to me, ‘This is where that great rosé wine
comes from,’ and I brought two special bottles home for Christmas dinner for the family. So I was comfortable doing that. I have only gotten respect from people since giving up. I think
because from very early on I was upfront and public and my drinking. I did huge interviews with the
Irish Times
and with Mike Murphy on the radio. That was probably one of the best
interviews I have ever done in my life—it was an hour long and I did the whole show with him about drinking. I felt it was that shame of being a mother and alcoholic and I had met so many
from treatment. You feel like such a scumbag . . . [A] lot of the men in
AA
also, I felt, looked down at women. They were just the men having pints on the way home. All my
drinking was done at home. I rarely went out to the pub in my last two years of drinking. I drank constantly at home and I think I did the publicity to get rid of the awful shame of it and to say,
‘Well, this is it, and it is a disease.’ And the only thing you don’t have to do is to drink to cure it and deal with it. All that time I was dealing with it in all those
interviews I did. I was very, very public about it and it was a kind of a deterrent also. But I felt I have enjoyed every moment since and everything I have learned about who I am and the
relationship with the family changes and the codependents come out of the wall. They find it harder to live with it than I did. I think that’s why I had to leave my husband. He would have
drunk every single day for all of the years I lived with him while I was sober, which was about ten years.
I cried on occasions when he was opening really expensive bottles of wine. The guy I live with now is from New Zealand—a great outdoors type—and never drank. He had a
few beers with the family at sixteen or seventeen and that was it and it’s no big deal. It’s great to have a relationship with someone where drink doesn’t enter their lives.
Because in the past it was a nightly dinner thing. I had often cooked dinner for fifteen people on a Sunday afternoon and woke up on a Monday morning and had to clear the table after all the drink
and cigarettes. So that was not going to last.
The pain and isolation that people are feeling, that’s why they drink, I think. Carl Jung wrote the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and I read him a lot. I did a
ten-week course and was going to go on and do addiction counselling but I didn’t have time; the career started off again. He speaks of it as being a disease, which means ill at ease with your
psyche. He talks about alcohol and drug addiction and depression as being various stages of being ill at ease with your spirituality and your physicality, your emotions. It’s about being
split off from things, and that’s where I was, right smack bang in the middle of that. My children would have inherited that so by the time they were ten, I was emotionally unavailable to
them.
I don’t think it helped my career, the fact I was sober. But I think that for the first time in my life since I stopped drinking I am only now realising what it’s like
to be really sober in my head. I have a new manager, Jools Holland’s manager, and am playing the Sydney Opera House in August. I have the greatest records I’ve ever made out. I have
broken every connection with the past, including my husband. I might not be up there in lights, but everywhere I go I still have a career. It’s much smaller than it was and much more
manageable and much more fulfilling than it was. Now I go into clubs with three hundred or four hundred people and love every minute of it. I’m glad I’m an alcoholic because I might
never have gotten to this level of understanding of myself and the rest of humanity or the humanity within my sphere of living. And I certainly have compassion for people out there that I never
would have had beforehand.
If you’re asking me what I think of Ireland, I think this country is fucked and it has been for a very long time. And whether it is
TV
or computer
games or the pub, Ireland has gone through this huge identity crisis. It came when we joined the
EEC
, and we had to shake off the Church and we had to shake off all the
shame and we had to acknowledge it.