MSP Relives Family Alcohol Hell

MSP's hell growing up with an alcoholic father

AN MSP gave a personal account yesterday of the hell of growing up with an alcoholic dad.

Nationalist Kenny Gibson told Holyrood of his family's dread while they waited for his father to return from the pub at 10pm.

And the MSP made a plea for greater efforts to fight the problems caused by alcohol.

He said he had been on holiday in Austria in 1994 when his mother phoned to say his father had died.

Although she said he did not have to return home for the funeral, he felt it was his duty to do so.

He said: "My father was an alcoholic - a chronic alcoholic. And it killed him at the age of only 57.

"By then, he was a wreck of a man - a pregnant skeleton that doctors will recognise as often being the end stage of being an alcoholic.

"In the last 25 years of his life, I don't think I saw my father sober half a dozen times.

"And I doubt, over those years, if anyone in our home had a decent uninterrupted night's sleep.

"We'd a terror of the clock striking 10 o'clock because the pubs closed and my father was due home."

He said this was why his twin sister Janis left home at 15 and why he went two years later, in the hope that their mum Iris, an SNP councillor and baillie from the Craigton ward in Glasgow, could also escape.

But Gibson, MSP for Cunninghame North, said his mother felt it her duty to stand by his dad and provide a bed at night and a meal "on the rare occasion he was capable of consuming one".

He added: "My father did not recognise he had a problem until he was completely unable to deal with it.

"In his view, he was able to get up for work in the morning and it wasn't really an issue for him."

Gibson told MSPs: "I have no doubt my upbringing was not so different from many thousands of Scots who have had their lives blighted by the problem of alcohol."

He called on the parliament to do all they could to change attitudes and behaviour in this area and he highlighted the problem of "foetal alcohol spectrum disorder" in kids.

He later explained how he had to be careful with alcohol and did not have a drink until he was 23.

Describing the scale of the problem in Scotland, justice secretary Kenny MacAskill said alcohol abuse cost £1.1billion a year and claimed a life every six hours.

He stressed that the government had brought in tougher regulations on stores selling alcohol and wanted to curb cheap booze deals.

He said: "I have asked for advice on what we could do to end deep discounting of alcohol and I want to take this issue forward as part of our wider alcohol strategy."

Later, Gibson said he had decided to highlight his own case to show how real lives behind the statistics we re shaped by alcoholism.

He added: "Alcohol runs in families and there is a genetic predisposition and it's important that I drink moderately two or three times a week."

He said: "It was extremely difficult growing up in family where my father was a chronic alcoholic, for a number of reasons. The household was not as prosperous as it might otherwise have been. But the main issue was that it was extremely disruptive.

"My father was a very noisy individual. He wasn't violent but he wanted to make sure that when he came back from the pub everybody knew about it.

"He liked to play loud music and sing songs and often we would get woken up and asked if we wanted a chicken supper.

"It sounds, in hindsight, somewhat amusing but it wasn't.

"He wasn't violent. But he was very loud and aggressive.

"A hail-fellow-well-met type of guy in the pub - but not quite the same when he was at home.

"I think it traumatised relationships between myself, my sister and my mum on one hand and him on the other."

He said: "The reason I raised this was because when you are debating a topic like alcohol I think it is important to tell it like it is.

"Everyone is throwing around statistics - people who are behind alcohol success or others who have got involved with the police - but I think you have to explain what it means for an individual.

"It's about real people and real families. It's about folks whose lives have been damaged as a result, not least the person who is an alcoholic."

He said over the years of his drinking, his father - also Kenneth - lost his sense of self awareness and was only interested in his next drink.

His dad had a working class attitude that, provided he put money on the table at the end of the week, he was free to "blow the rest" in the bookies and in the pub .

He said that when his own son Ross was born, he went to the pub to tell his dad that he had become a grandfather for the first time.

But his dad told him: "Can't stop now son, I've got a hot tip for the 3.30."

He said his father had started drinking during national service in the Navy, in the days when there was still a daily rum ration.

He was a telephone engineer but eventually he was unable to do his job. His sister Janis is now living in the US and married to a pilot.

The MSP said: "We thought that as soon as we left home, that mum had been staying at home for us and that she would move out.

"She never did, she took the view she had married for better or worse and stayed with him.

"She loved him for what he was and not for what he had become."

The Daily Record