Most people who come to me about addiction have stopped before. Often many times. The question is rarely how to stop. It is how to build a life in which the drinking, the using or the behaviour is no longer needed.
I work with clients across Ireland online, by secure video.
What the Irish figures actually show
The 2025 Healthy Ireland Survey found that 71% of people aged fifteen and over had drunk alcohol in the previous twelve months, and that 36% scored as hazardous or harmful drinkers on the AUDIT-C screening tool. About 1% scored twenty or more on the full AUDIT, the range that indicates probable dependence.
Average consumption for everyone aged fifteen and over was 9.9 litres of pure alcohol in 2023. That is roughly four hundred pints of beer, or a hundred and four bottles of wine, per person per year, including everyone who does not drink at all.
Two things in that data are worth pausing on.
The overall trend is down. Hazardous drinking has fallen from 41% in 2015 to 36% in 2025. Irish drinking is not what it was, and the story that everyone tells about Ireland and alcohol is a decade out of date.
One group is going the other way. Among women aged fifteen to twenty-four, hazardous drinking rose from 31% to 39% over the same period, while everyone else improved. That is the only group moving in the wrong direction, and it is not the group the national conversation is about.
Why this is harder to see in Ireland than elsewhere
A functioning drinker is difficult to identify anywhere. It is harder in a culture where the amount you are drinking looks unremarkable against the people around you.
If seventy per cent of the adults you know drink, and a third of them are drinking at a level that would register on a screening tool, then your own consumption has plenty of company. Nothing has visibly gone wrong. The work still gets done. Nobody has said anything. The comparison group is the problem.
What tends to happen is that the drinking is holding something together rather than pulling something apart, and it holds until it does not. By the time it slips, a great deal has usually been arranged around keeping it in place.
Ireland treats addiction well. That is not the gap.
I am not going to pretend Irish addiction services are poor. There are very good addiction counsellors in Ireland, and there is a strong recovery culture.
The gap is elsewhere. Addiction, trauma and eating disorders are usually one psychological profile presenting in three directions rather than three separate problems that happen to coincide. Someone arrives about their drinking, and underneath it is a relationship with food that nobody has asked about, and underneath that is something that happened long before either. Add the anxiety and the depression that travel with all of it.
You can find clinicians in Ireland who work with each of those. If you arrive with the full package, you will struggle to find one person who can follow you through the whole of it.
That is my specialism: the complex case, complex PTSD, where addiction and often an eating disorder sit in the same person.
What I bring to it
I trained in addiction at the Hazelden Foundation. I spent close to a decade working inside residential treatment, and I continue to supervise clinicians who work in it. So I know what residential care does well and where its limits are.
If residential treatment is the right step for you, I will say so plainly. If it is not, or if you cannot step out of your life for a month without cost, intensive one to one work is the same clinical depth delivered privately.
I came to this work through my own recovery from addiction and an eating disorder. That taught me two things I have never found in a textbook: how convincing the mind can be when it is defending the very thing destroying you, and that recovery is not the removal of a behaviour but the slow business of finding somewhere else for the feeling to go.
Anonymity, which matters more here
Ireland is a small island and everybody knows everybody. If you see an addiction counsellor in Dublin, there is a reasonable chance they know somebody you know, or that somebody in the room at a meeting does.
For some people that is exactly why they look outside Ireland. I have written about why, and what taught me the lesson, on the EMDR page.
Practicalities
Sessions are online by secure video, from anywhere in Ireland. Alcohol, cocaine, gambling and behavioural addictions.
I am a UKCP registered psychotherapist, a Jungian analyst and an HCPC registered art psychotherapist, with twenty-five years of clinical practice. Registration can be verified on the UKCP register.
If you are in crisis in Ireland, Pieta is free and open twenty four hours on 1800 247 247, or text HELP to 51444. Samaritans is free on 116 123, day or night. In an emergency call 112 or 999. The HSE drugs and alcohol helpline is freephone 1800 459 459.
Statistics on this page come from the Healthy Ireland Survey 2025 and Health Research Board reporting on alcohol consumption in Ireland. This page is for information and does not replace assessment or treatment.
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