I gave up drink at the right time

Declan Lynch

Ithink I got out at the right time. There is probably no wrong time to get out of the drinking game, but still I get this notion that when I made my own exit around the mid-1990s, the game in general was in decline.

And yes, I know that everyone probably thinks that; everyone has this feeling that when they were young, the whole world was young, but I believe that in my case, there is at least some objective evidence.

When I was going to pubs, for example, you could smoke. When I stopped going to pubs — or, at least, when I stopped going to them for drinking purposes, without the smoke, they seemed to be essentially different places.

Different in the sense that they were nowhere near as good — ‘good’, for these purposes, also meaning ‘bad’ in terms of health and general well-being.

Then again, you weren’t going to pubs anyway for reasons of health or general well-being, so we’ll stay with ‘good’ for now.

They just didn’t cut it any more, I felt, without that deep fog of cigarette smoke, let alone with these new obligations to actually leave the drinking site itself and take yourself out into the cold to do your smoking.

I remember the first time I was in a pub not drinking, and while I wasn’t expecting it to be any good, I wasn’t expecting it to be quite so bad, and for a while I just couldn’t figure out how that this place in which I had had such great times could be so unmercifully dreary.

Then I realised it was the lack of smoke. It was not just the drink I was missing, it was the cigarettes; it was the whole atmosphere of corruption and dissipation that had changed.

Indeed, I sometimes wonder if I would have bothered much with pubs at all if they had brought in the smoking ban before my teenage years. I am increasingly convinced that the 1980s and on through the first part of the1990s were a

kind of high point of Irish alcoholism in general — or a low point, if you want to be more technically accurate, but still…

I would invite anyone to look at some old TV footage from that time of a pub with maybe a band playing in it, or some other such raucous scene of communal enjoyment, and to try to dispute this historical overview of mine. There’s the noise and there’s the smoke, of course, and there are tables with about fifteen pints on them; there’s this sense that everything is just about a millimetre away from a scene of total alcoholic chaos, and yet it was just an above-average night in the late 1980s, in some pub in Ireland that happened to have a TV camera on the premises.

I spent some quality time in the city of Cork during those years, and while it was a time of terrible darkness in Cork in many ways, with the great factories of Dunlop and Ford having closed down, I can still recall much drinking being done in many places. I can still recall that people were going into pubs and not coming out of them for quite a long time.

It seemed irresistible, and not just to me. It just seemed to be irresistible as part of some natural law.

So yes, sometimes I wonder if I would have bothered with it at all if my first experience of pubs had been these smoke-free establishments, many of which had essentially turned into restaurants, not those ‘places of low resort’ that they used to be.

Though, of course, I realise that this an academic enquiry; indeed, it could hardly be more academic, all things considered. And while it is important for anyone to get a sense of why they started down that road, it is infinitely more important to get a sense of why they finished — if you figure that you finished at the right time, all the better.

But no, there is no wrong time.

“I couldn’t figure out how this place in which I’d had such great times could be so dreary”