THE inspiration for this book was the death from heroin of two Dublin brothers, Conor and Patrick Kenny, within a month of each other last Christmas. Their deaths were shocking but also not so. Patrick, the younger brother, was a long-time user who had stoically built his life around a habit. For Conor, however, it was different. A gregarious barfly and ambitious filmmaker, he had just started using heroin and was only (as they say) "chasing the dragon" - smoking it. Not accustomed to injecting, he shot up a fix which was potentially lethal.
I had known the Kenny brothers for almost 15 years, meeting them originally inthe bohemian underworld of the Grafton Street area pubs: smoky dens like Tobin's, Kehoe's, the Pink Elephant - a mid-1980s Dublin which has now almost vanished. Somewhere along the way, most lost contact with Patrick, so that when you met him in New York years later, he was a ghostly figure, always passing through, borrowing money which you knew would never be returned and which you knew you probably shouldn't be giving him.
For Conor, however, the descent was quicker. To me, it had much to do with hisdepression after the excitement of the Bosnian war, a conflict with which Conor became intimately and emotionally involved and from which he brought back extraordinary, reckless footage. It was also, he once told me with a twinkle of the eye, where Ukrainian peacekeepers brought in cheap morphine to "top" their poor wages. As he was mixing with the Bosnian locals for whom death could come tomorrow, why wouldn't he try it?
But, of course, some of his friends would disagree with this, as they now disagree on so much about the deaths. Many even disagree with discussing the subject in public, an odd reservation given the immense tragedy of two young deaths. Thus their incredulity at the thought of Patrick and Conor's aunt, Mary Kenny, writing a book about it.
Mary Kenny, the radical-turned-conservative: what would she know about it? In fairness, she makes a heroic effort to understand smack addiction, but there istoo little about her nephews here and much about Mary herself and her swinging '60s era. At times, her centrality to the story seems strangely melodramatic. For instance, accidentally detoured through East End London, she sees a hearse with a floral wreath which says "Mary". The next day, in Ireland, Conor dies.
The book is a welcome alternative, how- ever, to other, more censorious accounts of drug use and she rightly questions some of the myths which have hamstrung efforts to deal with the problem - such as, that all drugs are broadly the same or that one leads to another: the so-called "gateway theory". She also points out that most dealers are usually themselves junkies - helpless, desperate creatures like Josie Dwyer.
But the book is too instant and impressionistic. As with Marsha Hunt's recent excellent book on Mountjoy, there are heart-rending interviews with the families of addicts in England, but there are also rambling observations which mix the views of Inner-city nuns with Francis Fukuyama and his theories about the End of History. In the end, you can say everything about death by heroin but also, curiously, nothing. The much-heralded danger of the drug is also its appeal, like driving without brakes or bungee-jumping with a short elastic.
She quotes one of Conor's friends as saying that he "lived and died as an existentialist". Others agree: you make your choices, you choose your life. Reckless as it sounds, this has more veracity than many of the other quotes in the book. This is not to glamorise heroin and its phoney, rock'n'roll appeal. Far from it. Smack is a ferocious drug which sucks a hold on a person like no other narcotic. It has ruined parts of inner-city Dublin and has sent the crime and homeless levels soaring. By right, it should be treated as a health problem and not endlessly, and pointlessly, criminalised. But the Government hasn't the imagination to do this. Likewise, as long as it mainly affects, not the middle classes, but the doomed kids of Dolphin's Barn and Summerhill, then nothing drastic will be done. Meanwhile, in Dublin I - the Taoiseach's own constituency - the families of the addicts are left to fend for themselves. In this, at least, Mary Kenny is right on the button.
ò Eamon Delaney is a novelist and critic