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drinking sprees and a replaying of my
adolescence. I began dabbling in the music industry, and set up a company to promote acts around the country. I took particular interest in securing the drinks rider for the acts I was promoting,
far more than in helping cultivate their rhythm. The lifestyle I fell into meant I was on the road four or five nights a week, which in turn gave me further licence to drink on a daily basis and be
paid for it. My personality began to take on a nasty, ego-driven and arrogant slant.
    On one occasion I was responsible for promoting a gig in a venue in the southeast, and had booked into a plush five-star castle after, where a girl I had met in a nightclub a few weeks earlier
was to join me. It was all pie-in-the-sky stuff, running before crawling and all that. I had a meagre income, had probably lost my shirt on that night’s gig, and there I was splashing out on
an overnight in a plush resort. It was all about the pretence. A few drinks after the gig had ended, we headed for the hotel, which was accessible only by a private car ferry. A night porter had
been waiting all night for us to arrive and once we approached the quay, the ferry began moving across the bay to meet us. The both of us were well tanked and the night was foggy so we drove
towards the water’s edge, except we misjudged it, and suddenly the car began filling with water. We scrambled out the back windows, up to our knees in muck and estuary water. The girl I was
with had to call her ex-husband, who in turn called the car insurance company and organised for the vehicle to be towed out of the river. We arrived in the castle, dripping wet, covered in mud,
demanding champagne. I thought I had arrived.
    Throughout this period relations with my son were occasional at best and indifferent at worst. My finances were shambolic and I began to borrow heavily from the banks to support my fledgling
music business. The Celtic Tiger was roaring loudly and financial institutions were only too happy to hand out loans based on the skimpiest of business plans. One bank manger in Cork signed off on
a sizeable overdraft without needing me to call into the bank in person! I don’t want it to sound like I’m blaming my financial mess-ups on the banking sector, but the fact is they were
looser with the money than at probably any other time in the history of the State. Then again, I could be very convincing. The apartment I was renting ended in acrimony when I missed payments and
moved into a shared house. The next two years were a haze of weeklong drinking sprees, all-night parties, and increasing loathing and self-hate. My parents had to bail me out of the music industry
when I accrued debts to the tune of €20,000. My drink of choice was often double tequilas and pineapple juice, accompanied by steadily increasing amounts of cocaine and Ecstasy, often
mid-week. Journalism offered me some level of income, but I was frequently behind on bills and child maintenance payments, and often missed deadlines and turned up at interviews the worse for wear.
I passed it off by pretending I could turn things around at any moment if I really, really wanted.
    The image portrayed of a hedonistic lifestyle is one of attractive 24-hour party people, living on the edge, rejecting ‘Normal Street’ and not wanting it any other way. The reality
is often much starker, incorporating mental anguish, social paranoia, feelings of worthlessness and self-loathing. I was in a series of chaotic relationships, was afraid to answer the phone or even
walk into a shop and relied on alcohol more as a means of avoiding reality and numbing day-to-day experience. I started getting blackouts at an early age, perhaps my first one on the night of my
school’s debs when a neighbour carried me home and I lay beside a bus getting sick while all the attendees watched. I could remember none of it the next morning, so quite early in my
drinking, blackouts became a normal