50 ways TO LEAVE YOUR LOVER

Declan Lynch’s tales of addiction

Isaw a quote from Matt Talbot recently and naturally I laughed. Though there is a bridge named after him in Dublin, and a statue, the Venerable Matt Talbot is, perhaps, not taken as seriously as he used to be.

He is ‘Venerable’ of course in the Catholic sense, and herein lies at least some of the reason for his transformation from an icon of the temperance movement to a kind of a comedy character.

In the light of what we have come to know, we automatically laugh at a lot of things that used to be taken seriously when viewed in the light of Catholicism.

So we look at that quote to which I refer, and naturally we are amused: “Never be too hard on the man who can’t give up drink,” Matt advised. “It’s as hard to give up drink as it is to raise the dead to life again. But both are possible and even easy for Our Lord. We have only to depend on him.”

I mean, giving up drink is undoubtedly a big ask, but really, it’s not that big — and while you undoubtedly need to draw on what might be called your spiritual resources, you probably don’t need to have the kind of higher power it takes to raise the dead back to life again.

So there is this somewhat overblown religiosity which seems quite comical to many of us now. Moreover, this particular statement, which appeared on the excellent Irish History Bitesize! Twitter account, reminded me that

Matt Talbot, or a version of him, has made an appearance in an actual TV comedy.

There are references in Father Ted toa character called Matty Hislop, who is based on Talbot.

Ted tells Dougal that Hislop was “a notorious drunkard who found God and then decided to punish himself for his sins. Oh, he used to do all sorts of things. Like, he had this terrible allergic reaction to cats. So instead of avoiding them, he used to carry a kitten in his pocket. He’d sniff it from time to time. His head just inflated like a balloon.”

To which Dougal replies: “Fair play to him.”

Brendan Behan, too, was not a believer in the message of Matt Talbot, maintaining that he was a joke figure among the working people of Dublin; that it was more the middle classes who used his legend to try to keep control of the workers.

Though it has to be said that Behan himself was an alcoholic who checked out at the age of just 41, having neglected to undergo the kind of conversion that took Talbot from full-blown addiction at the age of 13, to a life of prayer and abstinence and mortification.

Each achieved world renown in his own way: Behan for drinking, Talbot for not drinking. And both are memorialised, with a statue of Behan sitting on a bench on the bank of the Royal Canal, and one of Talbot by the Liffey, with the bridge as a kind of a bonus for being extra good.

Interestingly, the one who couldn’t stop drinking is loved far more than the one who could, but then each of them has left a troubling legacy.

Talbot represents that tormented vision of the addict as someone who can only be saved by some form of crazed ultraCatholicism, while Behan is celebrated by those who believe that writing and drinking are more or less the same thing.

And yes, we laugh when we think of him too, but we feel that we are laughing with him, not at him.

Not that it makes much difference to him, or indeed to Matt Talbot, who approached the greatest struggle of their lives in such different ways.

Still, there must be an opening for a statue or a bridge named after the sort who don’t go to such extremes, what the law calls the Reasonable

Man — strangely, there are few takers for that.

“They both achieved world renown — Behan for drinking, Talbot for not drinking...”