A life devoted to addiction services was in Ian MacEwan’s blood

Ian MacEwan, ONZM, of Napier, is recognised for half a century of services to addiction services and counselling. Photo / Supplied

An online search for addictions counsellor Ian MacEwan leads you to the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous in New Zealand.

But the man made an officer of the Order of New Zealand (ONZM) in this year’s New Year Honours is not that man.

Ian MacEwan, 73, originally from Timaru, living in Napier for the last six years, has given 50 years of service to addiction services.

Funnily enough, though, the late Ian MacEwan Snr from the Nelson region was his father’s cousin.

The connection is close enough that it shows, like the substances affecting so many of the clients, it’s “in the blood”.

MacEwan Snr was also father of Nev MacEwan, who also took to helping others in his recovery after slipping down the slope into addiction in what was otherwise a successful career playing 20 internationals for the All Blacks from 1956-1962. He was dropped as rugby heralded the arrival of new international locking pair and brothers Colin and Stand Meads.

Ian MacEwan, of Napier, remembers the cousin-once-removed from his childhood days, about the age of 12, he reckons, and it seems Ian Snr saw something in the youngster, and it wasn’t a rugby player.

So it was that by his early 20s he was volunteering for Youthline in Auckland in its early days, setting him on a path, following studies in social work and addiction counselling in the UK, which would see him founding DAPAANZ, the Addiction Practitioners Association New Zealand, to represent the professional interests of practitioners working in addiction treatment, and help create a professionalised career pathway and an accountability mechanism which ensured competent ethical practice.

It was formed in 2003 and under his leadership (he was its first chief executive) it became the main platform for alcohol and drug addiction practitioners across New Zealand, now with more than 2000 members.

He had already been significantly involved in the work of the Alcohol Advisory Council and was a member of the group that established the National Addiction Centre in Christchurch.

He contributed to the governance of numerous organisations as a board member, providing addiction input to multiple addiction and broader health leadership forums, and he was a director of the Addiction Workforce Development Programme, now known as Matua Raki, the national addiction workforce development centre.

He has co-ordinated the Cutting Edge national addiction conference for 20 years, served as chairman of Kina Families and Addictions Trust, promoting family involvement in teaching, and has provided support to those in the Rainbow community impacted by addictions, through individual and group counselling sessions across 30 years, and with much of his writing on the issues in the sector.

Unlike many other counsellors, he doesn’t come from a background of personal addictions, but he’s not an abstainer.

He’s not too sure how he came to be nominated, but he says the citation reads as if it came from within the addictions and gay community he’s served, with one founding credit, thinking back to Ian MacEwan Snr.

“It was great to have had such mentors as my father’s cousin,” he says.