"Then it hit - I had three options: the grave, insanity or recovery".
ONE DAY in early May 2004, Dave drove down to the pier in a small fishing village in the
southeast, ran a hosepipe from the exhaust of his car through the window and prepared to die.
"At this stage, my whole life had collapsed. I couldn't look at myself in the mirror. I was a compulsive gambler and an alcoholic. Everything I had ever dreamed or worked for had gone. I had lost hope, and so I had lost everything."
For decades, gambling had dominated his life and he had hit rock bottom. "Twenty-five years earlier I embezzled funds from a company to pay for gambling. My parents bailed me out on the basis that I would never gamble again. The promise was easily made. Within two years, I was back gambling as bad as ever."
Fast forward a decade, and Dave is funding his gambling through more embezzlement, fraud and theft. "The compulsive gambler is devious, secretive and cunning, and I was all these things."
On this occasion his sister bails him out, but it isn't long before he ends up in more trouble and a building society registers a judgment against him. "I remember going straight from the court to the bookie's, having made more idle promises."
Putting money on greyhounds was Dave's "thing", but any kind of gambling was an attraction and, as he freely admits, he brought no expertise to any of his betting. "The winning wasn't important. It was all about the buzz."
Dave struggles now to explain why he got lost in such a ruinous activity. "I don't come from a dysfunctional family; in fact, I've been blessed with my parents, brothers and sisters." He talks of having experienced "something as a small boy I shouldn't have had to experience" at the hands of a priest, but says this is "no excuse" for what later happened.
"I wanted to be something I wasn't. I aspired to things I didn't have. My siblings were successful and I wasn't. I work in sales and I'm good at what I do, but I have an ability for messing things up. I was always looking for the easier angle."
Getting money to feed his habit wasn't a problem. "I had seven credit cards and got nine loans from the one bank. I took advantage of a system I was able to manipulate." All this time, he says, his wife Julie was "blissfully unaware" of his gambling.
Just in case, he used to rise at 6am to go to the post office and intercept any unwelcome bills in the mail. Three children arrived in quick succession, but Dave's problems with gambling and then drink only grew.
"I destroyed her, I left her a quivering wreck. Then I would walk out the door and be 'hail fellow, well met' with everyone I met." In all this time, no one ever acted to curb his gambling but in any case, Dave made sure his activities went unnoticed.
"I never stood in the one spot for long enough. I changed bookies constantly." Logic didn't apply to his activities. In one period, he travelled the length and breadth of the country buying several thousand tickets for each Lotto draw.
The idea was that when the announcement came that the draw had been won in, say, the west, he would get the thrill of thinking for a few hours that he had won the jackpot.
On that May day, his suicide attempt was foiled by Julie, who went searching for him when she found he was missing. His family put him in the Rutland Centre, a residential centre for the treatment of addictions, and Dave's slow recovery began.
"One of my sisters came in on a family day and told me that when she heard I had gone missing, she'd hoped I was dead. Then it hit - I had three options: the grave, insanity or recovery."
By confronting the causes underlying his addiction, Dave embarked on a process of gradual recovery. Two years on, he is, in his own words, "clean, sober and abstinent". He still finds it hard when Punchestown is on, or the tabloids are offering free €5 bets, or there is a queue of people in his newsagents buying lottery tickets, but he reckons he knows what to do if the compulsion returns.
Julie says that while the day of her husband's attempted suicide marked his low point, for her it was the start of a nightmare: "I knew nothing up to then. As far as I was concerned we were a normal family". As he went off for treatment in the Rutland Centre, leaving her to organise confirmations and birthdays, her reaction was: "You're gone. You've left me with all this shit while you've run away."
Slowly, she worked her way through the unopened bills and the emotional overload while getting on with daily life. The local Gamblers Anonymous group was wonderful, she says.
Gambling cost Dave about €600,000 in purely monetary terms, and much more on a personal level.
"The biggest mistake for people to make is to bail people like me out. It would have been much better if I had been forced to face the consequences of my actions much earlier."
