Our outreach worker, John is from Ballina in Co. Mayo and goes home every year for the Moy festival and although he hasn’t drank alcohol in nearly 40 years, while he is there he goes into the local pubs to see who else is around town. Last year he got talking to someone in a… Read More
A couple of days before we left London we went to clean the minibus and load up with water and soft drinks for the journey. Charlie would be making sandwiches on Friday night. At first John noticed the note placed under the windscreen wiper, then I noticed there was no wiper only a stump of… Read More
Aisling will be celebrating our 25th anniversary later this year. It is a great achievement to have kept going this long and not only are we planning to expand our service in 2019 we are as enthusiastic now as we were when we began in 1994. In the last quarter century we have worked with… Read More
Tommy, (AKA Nuts-and-Bolts) was missing and so his brother rang Aisling from Clare. He was worried about Tommy not having heard from him in years and so we set out to find him as best we could. The last connection we had with Tommy was at a sheltered housing scheme way out in the London… Read More
Driving around Ireland on our trip to Donegal this year we are constantly asked from lamp-posts, billboards and news media a very complex question with a stark either/or answer: Yes or No. Yes gives women the right to choose whether they should have the right to decide for themselves if they want to have a… Read More
You may have noticed from previous postings that John our alcohol outreach worker seems to find a connection with everyone he meets wherever we go because it seems everyone in the world originated in County Mayo which is the real cradle of civilisation (Mayopotamia perhaps?). But on this trip we witnessed something a bit more… Read More
Ardal O’Hanlon is very busy at the moment in fact I was watching TV the other evening and there were trailers on for two programmes featuring the man himself. One is a tour of Ireland in his company taking place over three hourly programmes and the other was: the Tree of the Year competition which… Read More
I had been sceptical about the approaching centenary of the Easter Rising of 1916, the opening salvo in the war of independence and the date that rings loudest in our national psyche. Mostly because I believed that the main political parties in Ireland have seemed to find the whole thing a bit of an embarrassment… Read More
Sometimes I think we go on too much about drink in these pages so in this one it is all about the lack of the stuff. On our June trip all the returners are ex–drinkers, ex–alcoholics and ex-hung-over–feeling–sick-and-sorry-for-themselves-the-next-day kind of people. There’s nothing new about this of course we have been running ‘dry’ trips for… Read More
When Tom left Dublin 25 years ago he came straight to London and went straight on the drink and straight onto the streets. Since then Aisling has seen Tom in various hostels throughout London and he is now in a small, supported shared house in Ealing where his drinking is limited to three cans of… Read More
