While New Order ran in a close second, our October Gig of the Month Award goes to the seisiún in the Coolmine Therapeutic Community presided over by Damien Dempsey.

An ambassador for the Clonsilla addiction treatment centre since 2006, Damo belted out mass participation versions of ‘Sing All Our Cares Away’ and ‘The Auld Triangle’ – the “jingle jangle”-s nearly took the roof off the gaff – and then handed the mic over to the Coolmine boys who all seemed to have party pieces.

From freestyle raps about kicking the dragon, a capella renditions of The Script (‘The Man Who Can’t Be Moved’) and choice Christy Moore covers (‘Butterfly, So Much Wine’) to acoustic versions of Soft Cell classics (‘Say Hello, Wave Goodbye’), skilfully reworked Rats chart-toppers (‘I Don’t Like Mondays’) and Patrick Kavanagh and Luke Kelly collabs (‘Raglan Road’), it was a supremely lively and positive way to spend a Thursday afternoon.

Noticeable throughout was the camaraderie among Coolmine’s current 37 male residents, many of whom are looking to knock their substance abuse on the head after spells in prison and/or living rough on the streets of Dublin.

Capturing everything for posterity was the film crew who’ve assembled the Recovery Is... documentary, which premieres online in November and gives a fascinating insight into how Coolmine go about their rehabilitation business.

President Michael D Higgins visits Coolmine for its 50th anniversary. Credit: Robbie Reynolds

Set up in 1973 at the behest of Lord Paddy Rossmore, an Anglo-Irish peer who became interested in drug problems after several of his friends succumbed to them, Coolmine has a second house on its Dublin 15 site, which caters for a similar number of women, some of whom have their babies and toddlers with them. While they work closely with and receive funding from the HSE, Coolmine is an independent organisation reliant on fundraising to maintain its services.

As for the effectiveness of what they do, 85% of graduates report being illict drug-free two years after completing the five month-residential programme and two months of ‘step down’ integration back into regular life.

Rapping and singing over, I asked Damo if there was a catalyst for him becoming a Coolmine ambassador.

“A great singer-songwriter friend of mine, Eoin Coughlan from Cork, was doing a bit of work up here and said, ‘A few of the lads are big fans, would you come in and sing a song?’” he recalls. “So, I came up and we had a great sing-song with the lads, like today, and then I was on a CD for Coolmine and basically kept coming.

“There’s always loads of love in the room – their support for each other is beautiful. There are never any bad vibes in here. They’ve been through prisons and homelessness and stuff, but it’s all just lovely people.”

One of my favourite Damien Dempsey songs is ‘Ghosts Of Overdoses’, the 2003 Seize The Day album track which includes such powerful couplets as, “There was pills, there was tabs / There was pain and needle jabs / And the ghosts of overdoses/ Replace the ghosts of tuberculosis.”

Asked what inspired it, Damo gathers his thoughts for a moment and then explains that, “I had a cousin who passed away in the bath after an overdose. I’d be in town quite a lot, just going around with a notepad, observing and scribbling down stuff. I saw so much addiction around the city, it was rampant. I thought, ‘In the ‘50s so many people were dying from tuberculosis, now there’s a new epidemic – and it’s an epidemic that doesn’t really need to happen.’

“I was thinking from the parents’ perspective – how hellish it must be to see your child succumb to addiction. I met a few of them today and, well, it must be a nightmare.”

A more recent song, ‘The Dirty Devil’s Dandruff’, talks about the devastation cocaine wreaks on communities like Donaghmede where Damien is from.

“Yeah, I know lots of people my age who are dead whether it be from heart failure or suicide,” he rues. “They got into massive debts and stuff like that. On my own road at home, I’ve seen dealers knocking round to people’s houses and saying, ‘Your son owes us thirty grand – we want it off youse or we’re going to kill him.’ They’ve gone to their grandmothers and got their pension off them. If you’re doing cocaine, this is who you’re funding.”

As bad as Dublin’s drug crisis is now, there could be worse coming down the track…

“I was on the phone to a friend of mine who was an NYPD detective and he just lost his nephew to cocaine which had fentanyl in it,” Damo resumes. “It’s killing loads of people in America. They put fentanyl into cocaine to make it super-addictive and I believe it’s here now. So anybody who does cocaine is going to be needing it all the time, and they’re going to be dropping like flies because of the fentanyl. People should really, really think hard before doing cocaine.”

Speaking last month at the Citizens’ Assembly on Drugs, Detective Chief Superintendent Seamus Boland said that, “We are satisfied that Irish criminal gangs have been considering the supply of fentanyl into the Irish market. This is a risk to all drug consumers, as cartels can add fentanyl to other drugs to increase addiction, thereby increasing customer base leading to greater profits and drug deaths.”

Fentanyl is the obvious replacement for heroin, which experts are predicting will soon be in short supply as a result of the Taliban destroying 80% of this year’s Afghani poppy crop.

It’s fair to say that Damien got into one or two scrapes himself as a teenager, some of them involving illicit substances. Can he paint us a picture of his own drug use?

“Thankfully, it was only recreational stuff like ecstasy. I remember trying to keep up smoking hash with me friends – it was doing bad things to my mind. I wasn’t really able for it and it put me into a spiral of depression for a while. You have to be careful. Some people aren’t able to smoke certain types of marijuana. That’s why I wish they’d legalise it so you’d know which type suited you.”

Damien Dempsey. October 2021. Copyright Miguel Ruiz.

One of the things that drugs destroy is potential. Has Damien seen friends who would have been great musicians, writers or actors being robbed of theirs by coke and heroin?

“When I was in my twenties I did a community employment scheme in Finglas in a place called The Fuzebox,” he recalls. “I went around with the juvenile offender kids and Traveller groups – all sorts of kids who were thrown out of school and that. I taught them to write songs and some of the talent was amazing – the lyrics and melodies they were coming out with. You’d be thinking, ‘If they take to this, they could be incredible’ but I’ve heard that quite a few of them have died since, they didn’t make it. So, yeah, I’ve definitely seen that.”

Someone who overcame their addiction and went on to have a fantastic career was Damien’s friend, Christy Dignam.

“Yeah, when I recorded a song called ‘Bullets And Diamonds’ that was on one of Aslan’s albums, Christy picked me up from Donaghmede and brought me out to the studio which was in West Dublin somewhere. Dropping me home, he told me about his addiction and the pain it caused him and his family. Some of the people who came after him when he owed money – it sounded like hell on earth. But he turned it round – the magic that him and Aslan brought to lots of people. Christy’s book was brilliant for anybody who was struggling with addiction. Just how beautiful life is when you shake it off. They appreciate the simpler things much more than they did beforehand.”

Christy’s last recorded performance was alongside Damien on ‘All Around The Town’, a reconfigured version of The Rattling Kind’s viral 2010 hit, which was premiered earlier this month on hotpress.com.

Damo was trying to get his head around Christy dying when another of his close friends, Sinéad O’Connor, tragically checked out as well. How would he sum Sinéad up?

“I’m writing a song about her at the moment – she was a warrior woman, you know?” he concludes. “Sinéad was just a High Queen and she can be very proud of all the great things she’s done on Earth. She’s good now – she’s with her son and her mammy. She missed them terrible. What a legacy she’s left. We were lucky to have her.”

That we were…

• You can watch the Recovery Is... documentary shortly on coolmine.ie. An extended version of our Damien Dempsey interview features on Stuart Clark On Drugs, the new Hot Press podcast coming your way later this month.