some benefit from sitting on a high
stool for large chunks of the day and theorising. You forget the hold drink can have over someone, how utterly powerless an addict can be over the forces of alcohol.
You forget about the reality you construct for yourself, about the skewed thinking and the insane list of priorities. Even monetary values are broken down into units—€50 was 10 pints,
or the bones of a session. Anything less and you needed a Plan B , a backup.
I got money from everywhere, from overdrafts to credit cards, from term loans to bounced cheques. Without a bank account thanks to credit problems, I would cash cheques wherever I could, from
local shops to pawn merchants. Christmas and birthday presents often found their way into pawn shops—anything to keep the session going.
It’s an insane way of living, a hand-to-glass-to-mouth existence, and you sometimes forget about the logistics of daytime drinking and what a full-time occupation it is.
By 3.30 p.m. only one of the regulars was left, nodding off (his first sleep in 24 hours), in the corner of the bar. Tickets for the annual Christmas Lotto were flying all afternoon as the
majority of the early-morning regulars made their way home for a few hours’ rest. Some headed to an off-licence for a naggin to help them through the rest of the day. The drinker’s
smell, a mix of tobacco and old jumpers, left the bar for the first time.
I got a chance to talk with the owner who has been working here for 27 years. The crackdown on drink-driving has significantly impacted on the older locals moving from village to village and
having a few drinks on their way, he told me. The younger people are now only into ‘quick’ ones, and are often only seen when he has a function in the bar. ‘They’re into the
shots and so on, although I have a more settled crowd here. You see it going on at parties and that and they tend to get oblivious to what’s going on around them. It’s mostly eighteen-
and nineteen-year-olds and their drink of choice has become spirits. When I was younger, and it’s not all that long ago, you’d like a pint and rarely touched spirits.’
I like the owner—he has his own health problems, which he has tackled head on with an overhaul of his diet and a positive outlook. Anecdotally, locals had told me of the manner in which he
looks after his problem drinkers—of him going the extra mile to make sure they paid their rent or didn’t drink every penny they had. I noticed myself that he was careful not to give
some of the regulars spirits and made sure they didn’t do anything foolish and get too out of hand. There was healthy respect among the regulars towards him and I got the feeling it went both
ways, and not in a superficial, ‘I’ll take every penny you have and pretend to be your friend’ kind of way.
I was interested to get his take on the difference between the problem drinker and the regular one.
‘That’s a hard question to answer. Every pub has a few regulars. You would have the lad in here, as you saw, on a Monday all day and he is probably a problem drinker. My definition
of a problem would be when they don’t go to work and things like that.
‘Some of the lads might be on the dole and waiting for the cheque on Thursday so they can be in here.
‘A lot of the lads are separated and they have problems. In terms of the money they might have nixers on the side and things like that. I wouldn’t have too many problem drinkers, I
would say, I have a few heavy drinkers and you’d ask yourself are they alcoholics too? They probably are. I notice, too, that girls are drinking much more now. They would now go for drinks on
the top shelf and things like that.’
I couldn’t help feeling, though, that the owner was complicit in the destructive lives of his daytime drinkers. He recognised some of them had problems, sure, but wasn’t he fuelling
the issues in their lives by serving them alcohol every day? Wasn’t
stool for large chunks of the day and theorising. You forget the hold drink can have over someone, how utterly powerless an addict can be over the forces of alcohol.
You forget about the reality you construct for yourself, about the skewed thinking and the insane list of priorities. Even monetary values are broken down into units—€50 was 10 pints,
or the bones of a session. Anything less and you needed a Plan B , a backup.
I got money from everywhere, from overdrafts to credit cards, from term loans to bounced cheques. Without a bank account thanks to credit problems, I would cash cheques wherever I could, from
local shops to pawn merchants. Christmas and birthday presents often found their way into pawn shops—anything to keep the session going.
It’s an insane way of living, a hand-to-glass-to-mouth existence, and you sometimes forget about the logistics of daytime drinking and what a full-time occupation it is.
By 3.30 p.m. only one of the regulars was left, nodding off (his first sleep in 24 hours), in the corner of the bar. Tickets for the annual Christmas Lotto were flying all afternoon as the
majority of the early-morning regulars made their way home for a few hours’ rest. Some headed to an off-licence for a naggin to help them through the rest of the day. The drinker’s
smell, a mix of tobacco and old jumpers, left the bar for the first time.
I got a chance to talk with the owner who has been working here for 27 years. The crackdown on drink-driving has significantly impacted on the older locals moving from village to village and
having a few drinks on their way, he told me. The younger people are now only into ‘quick’ ones, and are often only seen when he has a function in the bar. ‘They’re into the
shots and so on, although I have a more settled crowd here. You see it going on at parties and that and they tend to get oblivious to what’s going on around them. It’s mostly eighteen-
and nineteen-year-olds and their drink of choice has become spirits. When I was younger, and it’s not all that long ago, you’d like a pint and rarely touched spirits.’
I like the owner—he has his own health problems, which he has tackled head on with an overhaul of his diet and a positive outlook. Anecdotally, locals had told me of the manner in which he
looks after his problem drinkers—of him going the extra mile to make sure they paid their rent or didn’t drink every penny they had. I noticed myself that he was careful not to give
some of the regulars spirits and made sure they didn’t do anything foolish and get too out of hand. There was healthy respect among the regulars towards him and I got the feeling it went both
ways, and not in a superficial, ‘I’ll take every penny you have and pretend to be your friend’ kind of way.
I was interested to get his take on the difference between the problem drinker and the regular one.
‘That’s a hard question to answer. Every pub has a few regulars. You would have the lad in here, as you saw, on a Monday all day and he is probably a problem drinker. My definition
of a problem would be when they don’t go to work and things like that.
‘Some of the lads might be on the dole and waiting for the cheque on Thursday so they can be in here.
‘A lot of the lads are separated and they have problems. In terms of the money they might have nixers on the side and things like that. I wouldn’t have too many problem drinkers, I
would say, I have a few heavy drinkers and you’d ask yourself are they alcoholics too? They probably are. I notice, too, that girls are drinking much more now. They would now go for drinks on
the top shelf and things like that.’
I couldn’t help feeling, though, that the owner was complicit in the destructive lives of his daytime drinkers. He recognised some of them had problems, sure, but wasn’t he fuelling
the issues in their lives by serving them alcohol every day? Wasn’t
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