I will be in Kilmore quay this weekend? Are there any good local GAA matches or festivals on? Any other recommendations would be greatly received. @Mac @Bandage @croppy_boy @Fitzy @artfoley @Gman @Appendage @briantinnion @gaamad1996 @Wexford1996 @wexico14 @giloppy @somerandomperson
Nothing jumping out at me in the way of festivals.
Itâs a football weekend in the local championship - last round of the group stages.
Iâm not sure an intermediate / senior football double header in Wexford would be much of an attraction for an outsider, unless you were coming into Wexford town on Saturday evening for food/pints and it was a nice evening.
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Its alright Iâll pop into my delorean and get to see them.
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- needs coffee.
St Martinâs game might be the one along with intermediate curtain raiser. If there are any Paul Galvin sightings Iâll let ye know.
Most festivals would be during the summer so we can get as much money as possible from all the rich Dubs who have holiday homes down that way. It should be lovely and quiet down there. The Saltee chipper is a must and Mary Barryâs is very good - great seafood in it. Everyone raves about The Silver Fox but I found it relatively stuffy and overrated. Depends on the crowd youâre with I guess.
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Get the fish gougons in the chipper. Itâs savage. Youâll need to allow up to an hour though. They come from far and wide.
Mary Barryâs in Kilmore Village (5km from the quay) is nice but very busy and will require a booking.
Youâll do well to put in a full day in Kilmore Quay, cc @rocko snigger.
Wexford football is septic but the Martinâs will attack at least.
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Has to be up there with the best recommendations yet on tfk. Fish âgougonsâ and chips in a fast food joint where you have to wait an hour for the grub.
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They donât do the Cryotheraphy in Whites anymore no?
Allegedly a couple of Mount Sion boys got into the chamber without the proper protective clothing and got very bad burns on the soles of their feet.
Yeah that article popped up when I googled it. Maybe there was a compensation claim and insurance became too high etc. They didnât wear any footwear which is a big no no.
I think it all changed when the place went into receivership and was taken over by the Maldron/Clayton crowd. There was a big cafe / restaurant that fronted out on the main street thatâs been done away with now too. Anything that wasnât making a few quid was shut down it looks like.
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One could go for a walk and enjoy the wonderful surrounds.
You contrary auld cunt.
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I want to go home so badly today I feel like crying.
The Foggy Few and the Sky & the Ground being destroyed by a fire currently.
GAA
âI had no idea of the impact my fatherâs drinking hadâ
Hurling legend Nickey Rackardâs daughter Marion recalls how his alcoholism affected her childhood
Marion Rackard remembers the good and bad of her father
Denis Walsh
Sunday May 01 2022, 12.01am BST, The Sunday Times
Once I went to a ball on a Friday and came to myself in the local pub on the following Tuesday morning, still in my dress suit. I didnât have a total black-out for the five days, but there were large gaps in my recollection. I still wouldnât admit to myself that I was an alcoholic.
Nickey Rackard, The Sunday Press, September 21st 1975
On her 21st birthday, a fortnight after her father died, Marion Rackard accepted an invitation to speak at an open meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. It was the kind of thing her father had done many times during the last half-a-dozen years of his life, when Nickey was sober, and had resolved to make a difference in the lives of other alcoholics.
After her first public appearance the invitations came in waves and she travelled the country, sharing her experience of a short life lived in the shadow of drink. She remembers speaking about âthe disruption in the home and the level of fear,â but she also celebrated her dadâs hands-and-knees climb into sobriety.
Later that year, in November 1976, The Late Late Show dedicated a programme to the issue of alcohol abuse, and Marion was a special guest. In those days Gay Byrne was the convenor of the national conversation, and Marion knew that she had something so say. Everything about it, though, was a first draft â thoughts and feelings were in embryo still.
âI had no idea whatsoever at the time the impact my fatherâs drinking had on me really. It has taken years [to understand]. Itâs a lifelong awareness â youâre building awareness all the time. But particularly, I suppose, between the ages of 20 and 25 was a period of very heightened awareness, because youâre starting college, youâve all sorts of challenges, and some of these challenges are very difficult to meet when youâve had a traumatic background.
âYou donât actually realise what youâre living with until you move out into the outer world, and youâre meeting other people who havenât lived with this experience, and you realise that what youâre carrying is very different to what theyâre living. Thereâs a certain residue of anxiety, depression and self-esteem issues, all of which definitely accumulated [in me].
âI remember a period of five months where I found myself consumed with intense feelings and being very frightened and scared about what was happening to me. In a sense it was what people called years ago a breakdown. With help and support I was able to really recognise where this had come from and what I needed to do to look after myself.â
Rackard is immortalised in statue form in the centre of Wexford
Sometimes the depressions after drinking were near suicidal. Always the nerves were overwrought. Often the hands were shaking, the heart pounding, the stomach retching, the whole body crying out in torment. My profession could go to hell. My family didnât count. Bills mounted up.
At one stage I was so bad that I was whipped off to a mental hospital, not as a voluntary patient, but because I was uncontrollable. I was detained there for ten weeks. My marriage was at breaking point. And still I refused to take the conclusive step.
Marion was a young student working in London for the summer when a series of articles written by her father started to appear in The Sunday Press in early September 1975. In Ireland, in the 1970s, confessional interviews would have been rare and stunning and it was a courageous leap for Nickey to make. He had been sober for five years by then, and, on request, he had told his story many times in AA meetings and schools and parish halls; but not to a national audience, and maybe not so graphically, and definitely not in print, cold and fierce on the page.
Nickey Rackard was one of the greatest hurlers of all time, and in the series of articles he covered those chapters in his life too, but that wasnât the purpose of the exercise: he wanted to tell how alcoholism, and his years of denial, had ravaged his life. He wanted to challenge hand-me-down attitudes and embedded ignorance.
âIn Ireland, while the alcoholic carries a stigma, unjustly, the drunk is treated with a sort of amused tolerance,â he wrote. âHeavy drinking and âholding itâ seems to be regarded as a manly virtue by most people, and the wildest escapades are excused on the grounds of âa few jarsâ.â
âIâm really glad he wrote those articles,â Marion says. âI remember reading them and I literally might as well have been reading about somebody I didnât know. That was the case â I just did not know.â
In the course of the pieces Nickey touched on how his drinking had affected those closest to him, but he didnât dwell on that part of his life, or tease it out. As a self-portrait it was unflinching in so many ways, with that exception.
âI think it would have been extremely difficult for him to talk about that, or to recognise it, or even to hear what it might have been like for us. The big things for children living with a parent with an alcohol dependency are: donât talk, donât trust and donât feel.â
Nickey, left, with his brother Billy in 1962
There were days, walking home from school with friends, when she would have seen her fatherâs car parked outside the local pub, and immediately her mind would turn somersaults: âYouâre embarrassed, youâre ashamed. Youâre saying, âWhat time is he going to come home? What state will he be in? A child is always on the watch.â
The choices Marion made in her professional life were shaped by her experiences as a child. She trained first to be a nurse, but in her twenties she moved into addiction counselling, and from there into psychotherapy. In every home besieged by alcoholism, there is collateral harm, often untreated; the spouses and children of alcoholics became her focus.
âIt marks your life significantly. You cannot erase or delete the memories. Itâs not that the memories flood back, or anything like that, but your relationship with your parents is a vital, vital resource in your life.
âItâs not something that goes away just because you get help. You live with it. I live with this huge split about my dad that, on the one hand, he was absolutely adored and loved and he was a star. I often think of Georgie Best and Calum Best [his son]. Calum Best had to deal with that as well. The dad that he needed and wanted wasnât available â but he was available to the public through his playing. In that way I missed that dad who I would have felt connected to and attached to. That was a big part that was missing.
âHe just wasnât able to be present. Thatâs the way Iâd like to put it. He wasnât able to be present as a father, and our huge concern always in this was for our mother [Ailish] and what she had to endure. She was strong, but it took a huge toll on her as well. A huge toll.
When I started on my way back I was practically down and out. I had to start from scratch. I remember well when I needed a set of tyres for my car I couldnât afford to buy them.
There were five of six years, at the height of his Wexford career, when Nickey didnât drink. In 1951, when he gave it up for the first time, he didnât believe he was a problem drinker. After Wexford won the 1956 All-Ireland final, their second in a row, he didnât drink during the celebrations, but when the team went on holiday to New York a few months later, he started again.
Over the next 13 years his life, and the life of those around him, descended into hell. His veterinary practice suffered from neglect and he fell into debt. In Cuchulainnâs Son, Tom Williamsâs biography of Rackard, he writes that âby 1968 Nickey was a virtual prisoner of alcoholismâ.
âMy mother protected us from a lot,â Marion says, âbut I was certainly aware of the financial worries â really serious financial worries. It just goes to show what a spouse has to deal with when there is an alcohol dependant person in the home. Every aspect of an individualâs life is impacted â financially, socially. As a family, socially, it was difficult to go and do things together.
Rackard, right, congratulates Kilkennyâs Eddie Keher after he had beaten his all-time scoring record for a single yearâs inter-county hurling in 1971
âThe impact on family members is so significant and yet youâre kind of helpless because there was no help back then. There was no talk of getting treatment or help for the family, or anything like that. We still have a long way to go with that, even though things have improved.â
Nickey took his last drink in September 1970. He was 48; Marion was 15. In the last six years of his life, they grew to know him differently. âI would say he was a sensitive human being and it was wonderful to spend days with him in his sobriety, where you could enjoy an occasion with him,â Marion says. âBut he was very much a public person as well. My brother [Bobby] would often have gone to race meetings with him and heâd disappear because, literally, he was in demand.â
After Nickey died from throat cancer in April 1976, part of their inheritance was his career as a hurler. In the public imagination, that was separate from everything else in his life. When he was named on the GAAâs hurling team of the century, Marion stood in her fatherâs place, alongside his peers, and waved to the crowd on All-Ireland final day in 1984.
Twenty years later, when the GAA created new tiers in the hurling championship, one of the competitions was named in Rackardâs honour. Ten years ago a larger-than-life bronze statue of him was erected in Wexford town, and this week, on the centenary of his birth, his monumental achievements on the field were remembered and celebrated again. All of that is of a piece: his brilliance, curated.
âI think we were exceptionally lucky that we could celebrate that side of my dad,â Marion says. âThe light side of him. The side that had spirit and that incredible kind of warrior strength and courage and leadership. We were extremely fortunate to have that.â
When the statue was unveiled, and when the Nickey Rackard Cup was launched, Marionâs brother Bobby spoke eloquently and powerfully on behalf of the family. On both occasions he celebrated his fatherâs career on the field, but he didnât overlook Nickeyâs alcoholism. He said that Nickey regarded his work with other alcoholics in the last years of his life as more important than anything he had done on the hurling field, and his family were of that mind too.
More than 20 years ago Marion was one of the founders of Alcohol Action Ireland (AAI), seconded from the HSE to lead a charity whose purpose was to change societal attitudes to drink, and to advocate for change in government policy. Three years ago, under the AAI umbrella, she started Silent Voices. Its headline vision is captured in a short sentence: âA society where no person impacted by parental alcohol misuse will be left unsupported.â
Marionâs pursuit of that vision has defined her rich and fruitful life in public service. When you think of Rackard, think of that too.
HSE Drug and Alcohol Helpline 1800 459459; silentvoices@alcoholactionireland.ie
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