MANY tendencies in Irish life are working against fatalism. During the debate on divorce, the idea that this world is a vale of tears in which, if you've made a bad bed, you must lie on it, was not much aired in public, even though in private it underlay many people's views. Feminism; the spread of education; the democratisation of knowledge through the mass media - these help the fight against old oppressions.
Even the Great Famine, these days, is commemorated with a cheery energy, the reverse of the dull immobility of famine itself. TB is largely under control. I listened last year, when he unveiled a plaque to his heroic mother, to Noel Browne's brooding account of her life and death and the deaths of his siblings. The cruel Ireland he evoked is a much improved place. When he passes on himself to what will surely be an eternal reward the last authentically grief-stricken voice will have left our public life.
Yet we do not move onward and upward all the time.
There's still drink. The old madness and sadness and destructiveness still expresses itself in our stunning our brains and sickening our bodies and alienating ourselves from other people and from ordinary happiness by pouring alcohol into our bloodstreams. I'm talking about being drunk more or less all the time - not the occasional getting drunk for the hell of it, or the getting drunk sort of by accident.
I'm not denigrating the solemn rhythm of a quiet pub in the daytime, or the easy fluency between people numerous bottles of wine brings about, or the rightness of a strong hot whiskey at a windy race-meeting, or the thin-skinned, blurry peace of a really terrible hangover. Drink is wonderful. Everything to do with drinking is wonderful, even the bad bits. But alcoholism is different. And alcoholism is what Ireland is in denial about.
Alcohol is our snow and heat and hurricane and flood - the self-induced calamity that holds Ireland back, though nature has treated us kindly. And our alcoholics are disease-spreaders in a society that has the potential to be a strikingly healthy one. Anyone who knows anything about the courts knows that there's a huge streak of violence and brutality in Irish life, and especially in Irish homes, accepted as if it were normal. It is alcohol fuelled. So are many murders, car crashes, suicides, fights.
All those things happen, of course, in non-drinking cultures, too. Non-drinkers are well capable of wickedness. But drink lets badness out. The red-laced men lurching on to late-night buses have given themselves an alibi for what they will do with their rage.
BUT mentioning violence makes drinking sound like something only other people do. Whereas my own life is surely typical in having been affected at every turn by my relationship with drinking, and by men and women - as often privileged as not - whose gifts were never expressed and whose lives were never fully lived, and who made themselves ugly, and hurt and damaged themselves and everyone around them, through alcohol addiction. Most alcoholics never come to public attention. They somehow hold on to families and jobs. But they're like black holes in the fabric of society.
That is why it is so important that there are 11,000 recovering alcoholics that we know about in Ireland today - the number of members of Alcoholics Anonymous. Because you can multiply that number of the saved by the number of their partners and children. Especially children. I don't believe that children really survive an alcoholic parent.
You can call the police if a father or mother visibly harms a child, but the abuse inflicted by a parent who prefers a bottle to the child goes unpunished. Unremarked.
On Saturday night the President, Mrs Robinson, in the company of 1,500 alcoholics, launched AA's 50th year in Ireland celebrations I want to say "many happy returns" to AA, too. Its existence is truly remarkable. Can you think of any other organisation in Ireland which has not changed in the smallest way since 1945: which owns nothing, returns bequests, and is entirely self-supporting; and which, without and bureaucracy at all, held 74, 152 meetings in the cast year? AA is so focused and so effective that it hardly seems Irish at all.
And, from what I gather, being in it might strike you as also somewhat un-Irish. A member, by being a member, admits powerlessness over alcohol, and sets out, with the help of a power greater than the self, to change that self. The "12 steps" which lead to the spiritual awakening and the "12 traditions" which guide AA itself are phrased in the language of a down-home American optimism which can seem silly to Irish ears.
And yet this is the language of the group. And a member can't hide from the group. Group meetings are the vehicle of personal transformation.
YET it does often work. I know shy, cynical, even supercilious people who have found true relief in the AA fellowship.
They're miraculously unembarrassed by it. "You cover up your vulnerability all the rest of the time," a friend of mine said. "AA is the one place you can admit to it."
Perhaps the men who founded AA were far ahead of their time. Perhaps - especially in peasant societies like Ireland - we always underestimated the simplicity as well as the force of people's emotional needs. Who knows but that the loneliness behind destructive drinking is immediately assuaged just by being in a group of fellow human beings? Or is it the seeking help itself that works - the coming out of denial? Or is it that the burden of inequality is lifted when you're with people with exactly the same problem as yourself?
AA as such has no theories on this or any other aspect of alcoholism. AA exists to help adults who want to stop drinking to stop drinking. That's it. It doesn't explore why the person became an alcoholic in the first place. It doesn't do anything about the person's circumstances or prospects.
But just as you can't hope to teach something, say, to a hungry person until you've cured their hunger, so an alcoholic can't do anything at all until they stop drinking. And oh, what stopping drinking can mean!
Pillows no more soaked with tears, children no longer cowering, decent people able to hand up the money to pay their bills! These are old-fashioned images, but they're still the accurate ones. We go deep into an incorrigible past when drink drags us down.
May AA keep some of us from despair in the present. And may we hope for a future where Ireland might some day he like well, Israel, to take an example - where there's drink around, of course, but if someone comes over to your house for the evening, it's not normal to wonder how they'll get home.