On the trapeze

I went to Israel from Kilkenny in the autumn of 1983 and for the first few weeks I lived the life of a non-driving, single Irishwoman, meaning that I kept a close eye on my watch when I was out at night in order to avoid being on the streets alone around or after closing time. After a couple of nights of chats too good to end, I discovered that all there was to be feared was the manic bus drive down the almost empty steep roads of Mount Carmel.

Once you'd negotiated a shaky way to the pavement, the worst was over because, come midnight, life still belonged to day people. People were still chatting on balconies, putting out last minute garbage, shooing away cats and the men who had been drinking beer in the small restaurants, playing backgammon or watching the telly, were either gone or going home, quietly, soberly.

There was no gauntlet to be run. No vomit. No casual assault the like of which Irish women are raised to accept. The comments, the vomit. The streams of pee. The grabbed buttock or breast. The threats of worse. It took me a long time not to fear the prospect of a solitary walk home, to calm the adrenalin rush which would flood me at the prospect of it. How impossible it seemed that people lived without nightly feeds of drink.

I am not one who can be high and mighty about the subject of alcohol. My father opened a pub when I was about eight or nine years old. My grandmother was beside herself about it. We didn't talk about it much at home but the grandfather, who died when I was four, had been known to go on the occasional batter. Any mention of the Eucharistic Congress was accompanied by pursed lips. There were references to his sleeping in the barn for many nights when he came home from that.

The night of the pub opening, I was left at home with my grandmother. It must have been near to Christmas because the Jackie Annual had already been purchased for me and was given to me ahead of time as a sweetener. I went to bed with it as my grandmother prayed her rosaries and paced the house lamenting the unhappiness the pub would bring. I tried to comfort her but was more interested in the Jackie.

I suppose the pub must have caused unhappiness but mostly I remember the unhappiness it caused to me. An adored father whose only nights at home were Good Friday and Christmas. A year or two later, my parents went off with my brothers for the day and this time it was me pacing and my grandmother uttering distracted nonsensical comfort. They came home with piles of clothes and Cash's labels and within a few weeks were gone to boarding school. The Holy Grail and misery rolled into one. A few years later I also went off to boarding school. You'd wonder now how many children in the neighbourhood had fewer chances than they would have if the pub hadn't been there.

No one in the family drank at all. Though, coming into journalism where O'Dea's pub in Ennis was referred to as the front office of the Clare Champion, I stuck my toe into the wet stuff. At the Merriman Summer School in Scariff, I had my own Eucharistic Congress moment and downed a whiskey into an empty stomach while being shown the ropes by the then chief reporter of the newspaper, whose finest moment had been when he was advance publicist for a circus. He lived in memory of those great days. "I'm on the trapeze, love" he'd say when the drink kicked it, a soft smile on his still very handsome face. A couple of hours later, I was still so drunk that when I dropped my pen while trying to take notes at one of the lectures (the innocence of it!), I fell flat on my face while trying to retrieve it. They were all delighted with me!

This week, one of the newspapers has an article about Kilkenny and what a hot city it is and how upmarket the restaurants are and how much visited it is by Dubliners. The property prices are only soaring. I queued for a train for Kilkenny recently. Used as I am to queuing to go home on the Ennis train – a queue which is as quiet and refined as you could wish – I was shocked when the gate opened for the Kilkenny/Waterford queue and the pushing started and young men elbowed their way to the front, pushing women and children out of the way.

"Is there a match on or something?" I asked my friend who picked me up in Kilkenny. "Not at all," she said. "That lot come down every weekend. The drinking is terrible. Some of the bed and breakfasts refuse to take them anymore. And you wouldn't dream of going into town at night now, it's so awful."

In the weeks before we left Israel in 2001, we made an effort to do all the things we wouldn't ever be able to do again and one of them was a gathering near the city of Akká which is held annually and which ends at daybreak, when the sound of the call to prayer carries over the field's from Akká's beautiful mosque. My daughter was then 11 and rather than staying up all night, a friend came with his daughter to pick us up and take us to the event.

We waited on the Haifa street at 2.30 am. It was a May morning and quite warm. Tony, who is from England, picked us up and we drove up our street, past where the young men and women were still hanging around the café bar. He said, "I wonder if the woman we saw on our way down is still out". She was. Wearing a candlewick dressing gown and slippers, she had her dog on the lead and was taking him for a walk. "No woman could ever do that at 2.30 in the morning in England," said Tony. Nor in Ireland either. But, oh, we wish we could.