Ray D'Arcy doesn't begin his chat with motivational speaker, endurance athlete, teacher and now author, Enda O'Doherty, with the washing machine on the back going up Mount Kilimanjaro story. Instead, Ray, taking his lead from Enda's new book, I'm Fine!, starts with the alcohol addiction and Enda's years as a high-functioning alcoholic. And some of the numbers Enda shares with Ray are truly mind-boggling: 

Enda: "I was drinking about four bottles of whiskey a week. My Friday night drink would have been a pint glass of vodka and after a while I used to drink Benylin with that."  

Ray: "Why?"  

Enda: "Well, a pint glass of vodka was like you having two glasses of wine. I was relaxed, you know, I wasn't particularly drunk." 

His addiction was going to kill him, Enda told Ray. And despite the fact that he could hold down his job as a secondary school teacher, he describes what was going on in his life as slow-motion suicide. Ray put it to Enda that, in the US now they're reconsidering whether the label "alcoholic" lets people off the hook to an extent, in the sense that you're an alcoholic or you're not. Whereas, Ray maintains, an awful lot of people have a problem with alcohol. But for Enda, addiction is primarily about honesty: 

"I lied to everyone around me and I particularly lied most of all to myself. I didn't realise the damage I would have done to my health long term if I'd kept going with that volume of alcohol. The waste of life, you know?" 

The average person, according to Enda, lives about 28,000 days and, he suggested, we should be filling those days well: 

"We need to squeeze the life out of every one of those days and I think the sad thing about addiction is you lose that potential." 

You also, as Ray points out, lose an awful lot of actual days as well. So, Enda stopped drinking one day, more or less out of the blue, despite Ray wondering if he hadn't had a Damascene conversion while at his lowest ebb. Nope: 

"You know, sometimes people often talk about hitting rock bottom. As funny as it is, my moment of – my Damascus moment, as you put it – was, I said to my wife, 'I'm giving up. I'm going to stop. I'm going to change my life.' And she said, 'That's great, love.'" 

Well, despite – or possibly because of – his wife's scepticism, Enda has been sober for 11 years. He promised himself he would do his best to help others when he got himself free of his alcohol addiction. His experience as a teacher led him to suicide prevention charity, Pieta House. And Pieta House led Enda to climb Mount Kilimanjaro with a washing machine strapped to his back. 

Enda O'Doherty is a tremendously engaging interviewee and you can listen to his full chat with Ray here. 

I'm Fine! Thoughts on Life, Addiction, Love and Health by Enda O'Doherty is published by Red Stripe Press. 

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