Sobering tale of life consumed by alcohol

Lifestyle – Judy Murphy talks to Galwayman Michael Corcoran who has charted his hard-drinking life in a new book

I worked hard and I drank hard,” says Michael Corcoran. “I didn’t know I was an alcoholic – I thought it was what people did, they went for a drink. I never enjoyed drinking but I liked the social aspect of it.”

At the age of 69, Michael just self-published his first book, Be My Friend, an account of his life and his addiction to alcohol, which helped cost him his marriage. It will be launched in McHugh’s Bar and Restaurant, Claregalway, this Saturday, February 6, from 2-6pm, with all proceeds going to Galway Hospice.

Michael isn’t wrong when he says he was a hard worker and a hard drinker.  The genial 69-year-old was 14 when began his working life in Corbett’s in the city’s Wellpark tending to plasterers. He ended up developing property, most recently a string of nursing homes, before retiring aged 60.

From the age of 14, he consumed alcohol, often heavily, even though he didn’t like the taste of it. Mostly Guinness, he says. He preferred it to whiskey, which he loathed from the first time he tasted it at 14 when a colleague brought some to work.

“I drank Guinness and I drank a lot of it. I couldn’t get enough of it,” he says, adding that he didn’t really like Guinness much either.

Michael has been sober for 22 years, following a bad period in the mid 1990s, during which he “hit rock bottom”.

“Life wasn’t good, even though the family wanted for nothing,” he says of his drinking days.

Michael, who was one of 11 children, from Carrowbrowne on the Headford Road just outside the city, was reared to be a worker.

Aged seven, he began helping out on a neighbour’s farm in return for a few bob; feeding calves, cleaning out cowsheds and going to the bog. He also worked at home on his parents’ land, and says while money wasn’t plentiful “we had enough to eat”.

But with 11 children on a small farm, there were no luxuries.

“Santa Claus never came to our house,” recalls Michael. “I could never understand how he came to the fellow next door and passed us.”

The ‘fellow next door’ was an only child, while Michael had 10 siblings, which might have explained Santa’s absence.

After a year in St Mary’s Secondary School in the city, during which his family briefly thought he might become a priest, Michael decided formal education wasn’t for him and went working in Corbett’s. When his time there came to an end, he trained as a blocklayer.

He was young, single, had money and his own transport, so even though this was the 1960s and times were tough, he was reasonably well off.

Michael contributed money to his mother and the rest of his wages went on a motor bike and drink. Later he upgraded to a car, but drink was always present.

He travelled the country for work, spending periods in Limerick, Cork and Kerry, before ending up in Waterford, working on an extension at the Waterford Glass plant. During that time, he quit alcohol for three months, in sympathy with a colleague who had suffered from Delirium Tremens because of drink.  While this abstinence did them “a world of good”, for Michael it was only temporary.

Full of fun and very sociable, he was a big hit with the opposite sex and began dating Miriam, a woman from the area. Michael was 23, and by the sounds of it, still had a lot of wild oats to sow.  He and Miriam, a nurse, had no plans to marry, but “we had to”, he says. In 1971, that’s what couples did when the woman became pregnant. Ironically, Miriam miscarried just days before their wedding.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.