Wasted (8 page)

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.’

The problem is that there is not enough talking about it, but then again, like, what can teachers say? The majority of those teachers, and this is not a judgment, probably find
that their social life centres around alcohol, so what advice are they going to give?

Most of those kids are thinking, ‘I can’t wait to go to college so I can properly, like, give it a lash,’ that’s what they’re thinking. It’s
really much more of a societal shift that needs to happen.

The government are focusing on all the wrong things. They’re focusing on alcohol advertising and they constantly push this thing that the problem is young people
drinking. Like as if that’s the fucking problem. Just because those problems are maybe more apparent and those problems are out there on the street, people think it’s an
outrage.

So suddenly it’s all about alcohol advertising and drinks sponsorship in sport? As if any regulation is really going to make any difference—like . . . pub closing
times and so on. All the time they’re trying to chaperone people’s drinking—it’s not going to happen. It’s like the Bull McCabe trying to fight back the
ocean—it isn’t going to have an effect.

I think the focus should be so much more on people’s social and emotional health around drinking. I’d love to see somebody put out an advertisement here saying:

‘Irish people: Feeling like you lack self-confidence? Feeling like you have a social awkwardness? Feeling like you always thought there was something niggling inside you
that says, “I’m not quite good enough?” Ever had those feelings? Those are probably the things you’re drinking off . . .’

I find most people, if you get them into an honest situation where it is quiet, they will admit loads of things to you that they’re not comfortable with about themselves.
But if you’re in a cycle going out every weekend and getting pissed, everything is meaningless in a way, or if there is any supposedly meaningful discourse it’s usually full of
debate. But there’s nothing quiet or a bit honest there.

I’ve been all over the world and I’ve never seen a society with more blatant dysfunction on show than Ireland. Ireland is a wounded society.

Now, with the recession, it’s like the end of our adolescence. Ireland had a long childhood where it had this discipline factor coming in from all these negative sources,
and then all of a sudden you get fifteen years of liberation and people are acting out all over the place, which is totally fine.

But now you’re going to have to stop, realise, right, we’re heading into adulthood here, let’s get real. Let’s see where we’re really at.

So I do think Irish society is really wounded. And I mean, I love it and never want to leave. I can totally identify with the wounding! But I think if they focused a little
more on how everybody is wounded and a little bit less on how everyone is being themselves in a wounded situation we would get somewhere.

It has little to do with drink and everything to do with hundreds of years of people being adversely affected by the elements.

I mean, do people not think that there was a spiritual continuum if you had your culture ripped from underneath you? And then you have emigration and after the Famine, one
hundred and fifty years of ridiculous guidance from the Church, riddled with shame and feeling bad about everything, to the point by the 1930s and ’40s, you have a completely stifled
society. That’s not that long ago. And all these things are out there. I’m not trying to assign blame, but that’s what’s in society, let alone families, where you have
internal dysfunction and abuse and so on. I believe that if you were able to discern the percentage of population in Ireland with family issues, it would be higher in Ireland than in so many
other countries in the world. That’s a total assumption, by the way, and if I turn out to be wrong in the future, then I’ll be first to admit I got it wrong.