How moving to Toronto helped me to drink less

You can take the boy out of Ireland, but it takes a while to take the booze out of the boy, writes Eoin Weldon

LIKE many of my peers who toiled through early adolescence in Dublin’s sleepy coastal town of Rush, my relationship with alcohol began at a young age. I was 13 and had agreed with friends to smuggle booze out of our homes so we could get drunk for the first time in unison. After pulling off our respective smuggling operations we all arrived at the agreed beach location, a sheltered sandy bowl hidden in the dunes.

Most of my pals had chosen soft alcohol, and their safe choices worried me: I had come armed with Bacardi white. Over the next while we grimaced and gurned through the forbidden libations and pulled extra hard off our cigarettes to mask the alien taste. One friend got tipsy, another got drunk and inevitably some got sick. However, I topped everyone by getting absolutely polluted and, in a moment of horrific judgment, abandoned the privacy of the dunes and went stumbling and slurring through the streets of Rush, scaring people I knew and girls I fancied along the way. I ended my day violently ill and with an aversion to Bacardi that has persisted ever since.