Declan Lynch

Declan Lynch’s tales of addiction

Tales of addiction

The way it was told to me, when I was in the Rutland Centre, a couple of old friends of mine, George Byrne and Liam Mackey, ran into each other in a pub somewhere in Dublin. George knew I was in the Rutland and Liam knew I was in the Rutland, but George did not know that Liam knew.

According to one witness, it was George who brought it up, how he hadn’t seen me around for a while, and how he’d heard that I was off on holidays somewhere, maybe Barcelona. At which point Liam wanted to stop him there, and rewind the conversation, but it got away from him because he was finding it funny, the lengths to which George was going to provide me with an alibi for this top-secret mission, as it were.

It was funny and it was also touching, that George would be so loyal to me, and what he believed to be this need that I had, for confidentiality. When it was eventually told to me, I never mentioned it to George, and for all I know it was just one of those mangled bar-room stories that seem a lot more coherent in the recollection than in the actuality — Liam has only the haziest memory of such an encounter, and George is no longer with us.

But what we know for sure is that, from this tale, two things emerged — for a long time afterwards, those who had heard about it would describe anyone who was trying to deal with their addiction issues as being “off in Barcelona”, in the manner of “discussing Uganda”, the

Private Eye euphemism for sexual activity. And there was something in it too, about denial — if George was denying my situation, he was doing it for what he believed to be good reasons. But it happens for other reasons too, this reluctance to accept that somebody we know is trying to change the way that they live in such an apparently drastic way. Denying a problem in yourself is one thing, denying it in others is something else again.

Twisted though it seems when you put it like that, in fact, it is entirely logical that if your friend stops drinking, and he drank no more than yourself, you may start to question your own relationship with John Q Barleycorn. You may start to wonder what your old drinking buddy sees in this notion of not drinking, this weird world of abstinence for which you both once had such scorn. You may fear that he is changing the terms of your relationship, that he is contemplating this affair, as it were, which may bring an end to a way of life in which the two of you had some spectacularly good times.

And you are right to feel that a change will come, because it happens. After I got back from “Barcelona”, mostly I stopped going to pubs. I would run into George now and again at a gig, and it was never less than a good laugh, but it would still be a heavily edited version of the epic encounters we used to have.

And still some things didn’t change at all. I never thought any less of George, and I hope the feeling was reciprocated. We had never been overly judgmental of one another, and we weren’t going to start now.

Like a lot of these things that you fear about the process of recovery – be it your own or someone else’s — it’s rarely what you imagine it will be. Indeed, you may find it alarming how easily you can get used to a different way of living, once you understand what you’re doing, and connect with it.

In fact I often wondered if George was more disturbed by the fact that eventually I moved out of his beloved Dublin and into “rural Ireland”, than by my early retirement from drinking.

After “Barcelona”, we did meet one more time in a pub, just the two of us. We had soldiered together for so long, I knew I was entitled to an honourable discharge. And George knew that too.

“Denying a problem in yourself is one thing, denying it in others is something else again”