HARD DRUGS are the worst thing to happen to Ireland since the Famine. But we forget. We lose interest. We fortunate ones can afford to. Others can not.
The night that everyone who is anyone was at a premiere of Michael Collins a play was put on in Rialto. The women on the stage, acting, must have looked, once, like the girls in the audience. The little hall was packed and chaotic with people waving to their friends and changing seats and boys climbing over chairs and children playing at the back.
But once the play started, it was the teenage girls who were the most still in all the rapt audience. You could make out their impassive, alabaster faces, unmarked, pure. They chewed gum rhythmically. They sat immobile beside boyfriends. They didn't laugh at the bad language and black humour of this play about what having a drug addict in the family does to the family.
They will be mothers themselves, the people in the community asked to have super human strength, and they were looking at what may be their destiny. Though they probably believe that it won't happen to them. The women performing the play, their once youthful faces gouged by living, didn't believe it, once. But it did happen. All the women acting the play have heroin addict children, some living, some dead.
No one, outside the drug ravaged communities, thinks much about the families of addicts. Not many people pause to imagine the mother, father, sisters, brothers, relations, neighbours and friends, and what they endure in shattered trust, suspicion, mutual blame, fear and disappointment and pity, and destruction of all the bonds of kith and kin. The play in the hall in Rialto recently was about these desolations.
People called Community Response set up a support group for members of families of drug addicts in the south inner city, and the support included drama, a telling of people's own stories. A tiny theatre group called Inside Out worked on the drama with the members of the support group. It had been working with ordinary people for years, for example, it did a play with prisoners in the AIDS separation unit of Mountjoy prison a few years ago.
Last week's play was dedicated to the memory of the men in that Mountjoy play. Christy, Leslie, Charlie, Joseph, James, all of them dead, now. The counsellor who brought the Inside Out people to the family support group is dead.
The woman sitting beside me in Rialto has four children dead. Her neighbour had heard that day that the third of her HIV positive children had just died of AIDS in Scotland. Drug use is silently mowing down the boys and girls born into underprivilege. But life has been killed in them in many, many ways.
Being in the play helped the women, and going to it may have helped the audiences, from Francis Street, James' Street, Rialto, Charlemont Street, Donore Avenue, by taking a predicament so familiar to them as to be almost invisible, and ennobling it, as well as clarifying it, by making a play of it.
There was none of the antic exhibitionism of Trainspotting here. This was the real thing. The women in the play clean offices, as in life. The family lives in a flat. The father in the play goes to the pub for peace. The women meet in the pub on their nights out. A daughter is known to be in trouble with drugs, when someone says of her, "she was seen on the Barn last night".
That's Dolphin's Barn they're talking about. That's the stretch of pavement between the canal and the beginning of Cork Street. And you can see boys and girls hanging around there, any night of the week. In the torrential rains of early this November you could see them hanging around with their hoods pulled up. Drenched. Trying to score.
Vincent Browne was right, I'm sure, when he said in this space recently that there will never be the political will in Ireland to eliminate the basic cause of drug taking, which is the despair within the ghettos of our unjust society. But we can't turn our backs just because the revolution is not going to happen. A bit of understanding is better than pure ignorance.
If it is known that Irish people in general don't hate drug addicts, and don't rejoice in their premature deaths, and don't in general blame them for where they were born and the kind of circumstances they grew up in, then the people working against drugs can proceed with greater confidence, and ask for greater resources. Their work only alleviates the symptoms of the problem, of course. But alleviation is better than nothing, especially if the underlying problem is going to persist. I wish that more outsiders than myself had seen the play, but at least I can tell about it.
IT WAS a harsh play. The father and mother can't talk to each other without anger and blame about the sullen, lying, infuriating and infinitely sad figure of their drug addict daughter. Yet they can't talk about anything else. The daughter is ruining everything, the marriage, the mother's friendships, the father's pride in himself.
Yet there is a harsh pity for young addicts in the play. Especially, and this is what an outsider might forget, when they are trying to come off the stuff. When they're on "phy". Their lives then are harder than any young person's in this society.
"Apart from the clinic and the video shop he never crosses the door," a character in the play says about her son. They're stuck in small flats, the "recovering" ones, watched like hawks, having to stay away from their friends, sick, and aimless apart from the negative aim of not shooting up again. They can't even see why coming off, is worth doing. The miracle is that any heroin addicts at all come through.
Not that many do. The mothers in this play talk fearfully together. Her daughter will get better, one of the women reassures the other. "How many of them have you seen getting better?" the mother replies in one of the most chilling lines in the play. We're down near the bottom here. Down where even parents have almost given up. And every line in the play was born of bitter experience.
The audience knew the language. The actors knew the language. When they came off the stage they would go seamlessly back to using the language. It wasn't like going to the theatre, where you can think, "they're only actors". There was no way of escaping the brute awfulness of having addicts within the family and the community.
Yet, as in antiquity and throughout history, the very acts of performing and spectating made things new. The audience were queueing up to get in an hour before the play. They knew that even if the event seemed very far indeed from the salvation they crave, there was nevertheless a wellspring of vitality in the very fact that the performance had been created and acted out. The people in the hall were all reaching out for the energy they need to keep on fighting the drugs enemy within.