At the tender age of 24, Oisin Hickey knew something had to change. Already the once promising hurler had walked away from the chance to win a third All Ireland medal, finished wearing the saffron and blue, been in and out of jobs, had written off his car.
One bleak day spent trying to work while vomiting and shaking after days of drinking was the last straw, and seven years on he is far more reliable, works as a supervisor in one of the region’s top companies and is hoping to start life coaching.
He was part of the 2011 Clare minor team that reached the All Ireland, hurling alongside current senior stars such as Eibhear Quilligan, Tony Kelly, Peter Duggan and Shane O’Donnell, but when that crop were getting ready for the first round of the Munster U21 championship three years later, Oisin’s intercounty career ended abruptly.
“I was on the minors in 2011, with the U21s in 2012 and 2013. Coming out of school after playing Harty Cup and stuff, I took sport seriously,” he said.
“But when you start going to college and stuff, with the GAA you can easily get sucked into going out after matches. My last year with the Clare under 21s was 2014 and I had started to go out a bit more and stuff.
“I started playing poor in 2014, and I wasn’t enjoying hurling. I had a meeting with the Clare under 21s manager and he was telling me I wasn’t on the panel for the first round of the championship, and this was the team I would have started for at minor.
“Being honest, I turned to him and said ‘There’s more to life than hurling, I’m not enjoying it’ and I packed it in. To this day it’s my biggest regret sporting wise.
“If I wasn’t going out drinking all the time and partying, there’s a good chance I’d have been on the team and gone on the senior in the next year or two.”
Gone from the inter-county game largely because he was prioritising drinking over hurling, things continue to decline.
An alcohol-soaked summer in America sent him further down an unfortunate road.
“Hurling started taking a back seat. I just got into a rut where I was going out, drinking more. I ended up going to America in 2015, to Boston and it screwed me up a small bit,” he said.
“We treated it like a J1. When you go over it’s a drinking culture for younger lads. I think I was making $1,000 dollars a week over there with no bills. Other lads were making $600. I told my boss I’d work Wednesday to Friday, so then I was making $600 working Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
“We were going out drinking Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. You’d have a few on the Tuesday too. What happened was I ended up bringing this home with me.”
At the age of 22 he was a serious binge drinker and not a great person to be around at times.
“I was a binge drinker, I’d start of a Friday and finish on a Monday kind of thing. The consequences of you drinking start to come through,” he said.
“You start to get a reputation of being a bit messy, or people say ‘oh Jesus, he’s out again’, you’d be falling out with people, you’re hiding stuff, manipulating people because you don’t want them to see what you’re at.”
He was also using harder drugs, although alcohol was still very much his number one.
“What happens these days is you end up cross-addicted. You end up taking drugs on top of the drink, which is the new norm. For me, my drug of choice was alcohol. But for me to keep drinking, at times I’d end up taking cocaine to sober me up a bit so I could keep drinking,” he said.
“The worst thing is you surround yourself with like minded people, so you don’t feel half as bad. I was going in and out of jobs, starting college courses but not finishing them. I was going out with girls, but my priorities were arseways, you’d think of no one only yourself, you don’t care about what other people think. And you think ‘ah, I’m only hurting myself’.”
His own version of rock bottom arrived after a few days of very hard drinking over the course of a Bank Holiday weekend.
“I had work on Monday night, but I had to be dragged out of the pub to go to bed for a few hours to go to work,” he said.
“I only had about four hours sleep, I wasn’t in the best condition when I had to go out the door that evening. This is where your mind goes; I remember thinking ‘if I have a little tip here in the car I won’t have to go to work’.
“Do you know the slip road that you take for Shannon after the Two Mile Inn? There’s a thing there that highlights the slip off. All I was driving was a Fiat Punto and I thought if I clip into this I won’t have to go to work. But I said I won’t, I need the car, that’s just a split second decision.
“I really didn’t want to go to work because I was dying, and I was thinking about crashing the car to get out of work. It’s mental.
“I was dying in work for the whole shift, I was puking into a bin, and I had only been in the job a week.
“The shakes were starting to come and I was getting palpitations. I was literally crying on the way home in the car, the fear and anxiety were going through me. I knew something was going to give.”
He knew a bit about addiction, could see where things were going, and he realised it was time to stop.
“The reason I ended so young was that I had education around alcoholism from people in my family and stuff in the past. I had a good understanding of it, and I knew where it was going,” he said.
“I knew it was snowballing and I didn’t want to live a life like that. But how many times do you wake up after a good session and say I’m never drinking again, and then a week later you’re at it again? I knew where I was at but I said I need to give myself a week, need to wait until I’m fully sober and fresh and make the decision.
“At the end of the week I was sober out, and I remember thinking ‘yeah, I need to do this’. I texted my father and said I need to get help. He replied and said this is the best thing you’ll ever do.”
Oisin wanted to stay in his job so he went for non-residential help at Limerick’s Saoirse Addiction Centre, which was great for him.
“By you going in it proves you are making an effort to get your sobriety,” he said.
“With residential, you can leave, but you’re away from everyday life, and what I found good with Saoirse was that you were learning stuff and then you were taking it away and applying it in real life. You’re out in real life for most of the time, but you’re tipping in and keeping the tools sharp.”
Over time there he developed some more self awareness and understanding of his own addiction.
“On a Tuesday and Thursday I’d have to go in for four hours and your first six weeks is education around what addiction is.
“There’s a second six week period about recovery, it kind of gets more personal then. You learn about yourself, your triggers and your journey.
“For a young fella I was like an old man, I loved going to a pub drinking pints of Guinness and listening to a fella playing music. A trigger for me could be Christy Moore or the Wolfe Tones coming on the radio, you can visualise yourself back drinking, so you have to catch these thoughts at the start.
“Change the channel, turn off the radio, put on something else so you’re not thinking of the past.
“You do that for another six weeks and at the end of it if you are comfortable to move onto aftercare you can move on, but if not you have the choice to stay and do another few weeks. All of this is free, which is brilliant, because residential places can be a couple of grand.
“With addiction you are on your own, people can only point you in the direction, but you have to go. It’s up to me whether I want to give it up or not. A lot of people go to rehab for the wrong reasons, end up coming out and relapsing because deep down they didn’t want to give it up.
“I ended up going to a place in Limerick called the Saoirse Addiction Centre. I didn’t want to go to Bushy Park or anything, because I had only started a new job and I wanted to try and keep it, I didn’t want to start a job and then go away for a month.
“Saoirse Addiction Centre was brilliant, it was on your own back whether you go in or not, and it’s not residential. You had to go in two days a week for four hours.
He was adamant that he wanted to be able to socialise and enjoy himself afterwards, and there were challenges, but he got used to it.
“I’m lucky enough that I was always a bit outgoing, but it took me three or four years before I could get up and dance at a wedding,” he said.
“You feel like the eyes are burning in the back of your head, that people are judging you and all of that. It’s not an overnight process, it took me a few years to really come around, realise that no one cares, go and have a laugh and be yourself.”
Whatever challenges come with not drinking they vanish into insignificance when compared with the reality of addiction.
“I lost a friend in November to addiction, they were killed in a car crash. I have another friend in and out of rehab for the last two or three years. He’s on track again, but it’s a dangerous thing,” he said.
“The consequence of addiction could be death. I wrote off a car before with a friend of mine in it, I hit a tree. I had run out of money to go drinking in town, but I had a cheque that the local pub would cash, and I was driving back to cash it to go drinking again when I hit the tree.
“Thankfully I was never off the road because I was never caught, but that’d be another consequence, it’s death or get put off the road and you can’t work because you can’t get to places.”
He was afraid a sudden drop would set him back, but seven years later he says it never happened.
The positives of giving up alcohol have also become apparent.
“Over time you see the benefits of not drinking. I had been working in a sports shop but I was lucky enough to get into a good company in Shannon, got five years experience in manufacturing,” he said.
“I’m in Regeneron at the minute, I started as an operator, I became a lead and I’m a supervisor in the company now. I’ve an engineering degree. I wouldn’t have done any of that if I didn’t get my sobriety. All it was doing was holding me back from being the best version of Oisin possible.”
Still hurling with Parteen/Meelick, his biggest sporting regret is walking away from a successful Clare U-21 side, but he feels lucky for all he has got from sport. “I packed it in and the excuse was there’s more to life than hurling. The more to life was that I wanted to be out partying,” he said.
“The lads went on to win the Munster and All-Ireland, so I missed out on my third U-21 All-Ireland with Clare.
“But I can’t feel sorry for myself, I was very fortunate part of good minor teams, two years of under 21, playing Harty Cup and all of that. I have had serious memories and opportunities with the hurling.
“I’m really, really grateful for that. The regret is the last year, it’s a missed opportunity because of alcoholism. That’s the learning from it, you do miss out on stuff because that takes over your life instead of the stuff you love.”
In early July he posted on Facebook about his journey to sobriety, inviting people to contact him if they are in similar situations and he feels he can use his own experience to help others.
“It’s important for people out there to see, it’s a genuine story that some people can relate to.” he said.
“Some people would know someone in addiction or out of it. I got a message from a lad who is sober six months and he said that reading that galvanised why he is doing it. Some people keep it a secret because they might be embarrassed about it or whatever. I’ve done a lot of good things in my life, but that’s probably the best thing I’ve ever done.
“It was a massive thing for me to do. Some people I haven’t met in years are shocked when they hear I haven’t drank in years, because of who I was before, they think I’m the old Oisin. If that post can help one person I’d be happy.”
Owen Ryan has been a journalist with the Clare Champion since 2007, having previously worked with a number of other publications in Limerick, Cork and Galway. His first book will be published in December 2024.