Written some “five years ago,” sometime after Ó Cairealláin cut ties with the addiction that bound him between the ages of 16-23, Minimal Human Contact is a somewhat autobiographical day in the life of an addict.

He choose to produce it now, with the help of West Belfast Irish language theatre company Aisling Ghéar, because of the hold gambling had over those suffering in lockdown.

“People were and are being raped and pillaged by the local bookmakers like I was,” he tells me now over a pint of Guinness in Grogans on South William Street in Dublin.

The play was performed in Smock Alley, just minutes from where we’re sitting, for the Dublin Fringe Festival in September, and then later that month in West Belfast’s Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich for the Belfast International Arts Festival.

“There were and still are bookies on every corner in West Belfast,” he says. “It’s built into the working-class culture. But now the bookies are creating these machines which are super addictive, using lights and sounds to make it so easy to become addicted, and when you put these things in economically disadvantaged areas, you’re really preying on people.”

Performed entirely as Gaeilge (Ó Cairealláin himself is a native Irish speaker and performs as part of the award-winning Irish hip-hop duo KNEECAP), the audience is met with darkness throughout, except for blue lights seen on the headphones of those availing of English translation services.

We meet Irish working-class lead character Oisín (Seán T. Ó Meallaigh from Irish Western series An Klondike) dressed in a North Face tracksuit and Nike runners. He darts frantically in different directions. He’s frightened. His face is permanently startled, his movements animalistic. He’s on his last £300, stolen from his mother’s room.

“The thing about gambling is that it’s a symptomless addiction,” says Ó Cairealláin. “When you’re addicted to drink, you turn yellow. When you’re on heroin, you go skinny. I looked and acted the same even when I was in the bookies for 10 hours a day. Even though my insides were rattling.”

His experience with dependency began at “15 or 16” years of age in his hometown of West Belfast. “Me and my friends all just enabled each other through it,” he says. “If I won £1,000, I’d pass it on to whoever to keep going and he’d give it right back.”

Video of the Day

Gambling is rife in Belfast, as it is in the rest of the island of Ireland — we rank third in the world for the most obsessive gamblers after Australia and Singapore. “There are 15 bookies in my area,” says Ó Cairealláin. “Ladbrokes sponsored my GAA team.”

Oisín is tempted into casinos by way of bright lights and the promise of more. “Chinese families own all the gambling places around us, so they’d constantly plate up Chinese food to keep you there,” he says.

The lure of free food might have persuaded him in the short term, but Ó Cairealláin acknowledges now that it was his and his friends’ collective trauma that bound him to the slots. As a vulnerable teenager growing up in a working-class area, escape was largely futile.

“Working-class areas have higher levels of trauma, poverty is traumatic,” he says. “And the reality is that if there wasn’t a high level of trauma, they [gambling companies] wouldn’t be profiting off us. The machines these days are so effective too, so child friendly. The lights and the sounds.

“To think, there’s someone in an office building being paid thousands of pounds in order to make these machines as impossible to leave as can be. When you’re an addict, you’re in survival mode constantly — and when bright lights and high sounds tempt you in, there’s not much you can do.”

Close

Seán T. Ó Meallaigh plays an addicted gambler

According to Extern Problem Gambling, there are an estimated 60,000 problem gamblers in Ireland — 30,000 in the Republic of Ireland and 30,000 in Northern Ireland. Echoing this is research from the Health Research Board (HRB), whose key findings from the 2019/20 National Drug and Alcohol Survey show that almost half (49pc) of people aged 15-plus say they gambled in the 12 months prior to the survey.

The latest figures, published in the 2014/15 Drug Prevalence Survey by the Department of Health, show that two-thirds of the population aged 18-plus have gambled in the last 12 months and more than 40pc of people gamble on a monthly basis or more often.

Ireland has the third highest gambling losses per capita in the world, losing some €3.2bn to gambling every year. The most common type of gambling sees four-in-10 people buying a lottery ticket or scratch card in person, with one-in-10 gambling in a bookmaker’s shop, and just under one-in-10 placing a bet on horse or dog racing.

Some 90,000 Irish adults are classed as low-risk gamblers, according to the HRB, while problem gambling is “associated with living in a deprived area and being unemployed”.

For those not living close to a bookmaker (unlikely, as according to the Department of Justice, there are approximately 1,175 licensed betting offices in Ireland — for context, there are 134 Dunnes Stores), a lot of video games contain in-game purchases and downloadable content, something Irish justice spokesman Jim O’Callaghan says constitutes a form of gambling.

People who develop gambling disorders earlier in life often tend to have problems with substance abuse or impulsive disorders later in life. According to youthgambling.ie, problem gamblers are 15 times more likely to take their own lives.

The nub of Minimal Human Contact fixates around Oisín’s final £30, tricked out of his hand by a homeless man. It alternates between glimpses into Oisín’s own racing thoughts and the reality of the situation, echoing that of the playwright’s personal truth.

“I was in so much debt, I was borrowing from money lenders like the now-illegal Wonga — any way to get cash, I was doing it,” says Ó Cairealláin.

Our lead finally collapses to his knees, visually anchoring his mental and physical states. His lowest low. “I know some former addicts have come to see the play and thought it was really lifelike,” he says. “It’s actually been really interesting for me to relive that time through the way I am now. I hope it’s the same for them.”

The final scene tracks our lead — who at this stage, has been the only actor on stage for some 38 minutes — repeating the slogan introduced by the gambling industry-funded responsible betting body Senet Group in 2015: “When the fun stops, stop”. This is the first time Oisín speaks in English. He says it four times, encouraging the audience to join louder each time.

Minimal Human Contact possesses a feral and animalistic sensitivity to the life of a person crippled by addiction, leaving their personhood on the chewing gum-stained tarmac outside of casinos.

Ó Cairealláin’s very personal script is anguished, befitting the trials of a person whose life slips as his dependency takes over. “This drama will not do much damage to the gambling industry, but perhaps it will begin a proper conversation,” he says.

If you want to learn how to stop gambling or if you or a family member are affected by a loved one’s addiction, please text 089 241 5401 (ROI) or 07537 188 575 (NI) to Extern Problem Gambling’s helpline and free specialist counselling service to arrange a callback (Mon-Fri, 9am-5pm) or email [email protected].