The elephant in the distillery

It is a sad sight, cycling past St Michael’s College in the morning. Two young lads from the school died within hours of each other while their group was celebrating the end* of the Leaving Certificate exam in Greece.

It is every parent’s nightmare. You love your kids. You nurture them. You accompany them through all the high-dependency stages of childhood. You guide them, cajole them, encourage them, reprimand them, warn them, spoil them, applaud them. You are a parent, and you love them, end of story. And then they grow older and the need for validation from their peer group literally means everything to them. They no longer need you. Or at least they think they no longer do. So you reluctantly trust them, or at least you try to. You cave in and grant them that bit of freedom they so desperately crave. The need to be free. From you, from rules, from boundaries, from limits, from sobriety.

Andrew O’Donnell fell and died on the Greek island of Ios. On his way back from a night out. After getting separated from the rest of his group. It is tragic. It is soul destroying for his parents, family and friends. I can’t even begin to fathom the distress, and incomprehension and gut-wrenching grief that were thrust upon them on hearing of the news of his death. The hammer blow of the unthinkable that had just happened. I feel so incredibly sorry for them.

Yet I want to say out loud what most parents are reading between the lines in the reports of the terrible accident. I want to shine a light on the elephant in the distillery. Just how drunk was Andrew at the end of night with his mates? How impaired was his judgement? What risks did he take that he would never have taken had he been slightly inebriated as opposed to hammered, or pissed, or legless, or paralytic, or wasted, or ossified, or plastered, or scuttered? (One of these often affectionate and self-derogatory terms that we commonly use to brag about a state of self-inflicted incapacitation)  The Irish media are strangely reserved on the topic. For a country that celebrates the craic and the banter and the time-tested tradition of turning a benevolent blind eye on the excesses of binge drinking, very few are willing to raise their heads over the parapet and declare that it is alcohol and peer pressure that killed that poor young lad. Not fate or a freak incident. Yes, a young life that was tragically cut short, as is often mentioned in the press. I agree 110%. Yet it didn’t have to be. It was avoidable.

The death of Max Wall, another student at St Michael’s, is no less tragic and no less traumatic and for his poor parents it spells the end of life-as-it-was. They too have lost a son. The Irish press are however a lot more forthcoming with possible causes for his death (“It is understood Mr Wall previously had health issues with his heart, with one source confirming he had a successful heart operation about three years ago. It is likely the postmortem, which will take place in Athens, will investigate whether these prior health issues could have been a contributory factor in his death) .


As an enthusiast and dedicated binge drinker for a good part of my life, I can only thank chance and the randomness of it all that I was not one of these teenagers full of promises whose young life was unfairly cut short. It is only too easy to turn into a lesson giver. It is not really the purpose of today’s blip. Nothing I say here would ever change anything. I have lived and enjoyed and abided by the Law of the Craic. It is just that there are two things that really get me in life: waste, of any kind. Especially young lives that mean absolutely everything for the parents who have brought these little beings into the world, nurtured and loved them. And hypocrisy. I fucking hate hypocrisy. There is a flip side to the Craic. It is all too real. All too hurtful. And unfortunately all too frequent. We as a nation just become uncharacteristically reticent when that happens.
 
 
* it is a significantly more convenient for a lot of the revellers to celebrate the end of the exam rather than the actual results in said exam. I wonder if some disappointed parents on 25th August seek to be compensated for the non-insignificant expense...