2.1.2 A Bit About Me!

Everyone’s life contains twists and turns and at this stage you might have an interest in where I am coming from – as is said so often nowadays.

(Or you may not, in which case you can fast forward to the next Sub-Chapter)!

I am currently a community worker and a psychotherapist, who started off my career as a soldier and a physicist.  I love cycling, music and anything to do with boats and rivers. I am a son, brother, husband, Dad, and Granddad – in that order! I was in the Defence Forces for over 22 years – a considerable slice of anyone’s life.  But I believe that community work is my real strength.

I feel very lucky that I found something interesting to do with my life and I don’t take it for granted.

Now I was intrigued, when I started writing this, to see what would emerge (we’ll be using that word again) if I threw the experiences of family life, soldiering, boating, physics, psychotherapy, music, and community work into a pot and mixed them all together.  I’d like to think that I bring the best of what I have learned in all the above to community work and to this website also.

I went to secondary school in Sexton’s St. CBS in Limerick.  I was never the brightest in any class that I was in but I was (and still am) quite a hard worker.  I retain a lot of core beliefs about hard work from my schooldays.  This, of course, was matched by the work ethic in my home and, I believe, in my extended family in general.

In my teens/twenties I was quite good at physics (and mathematics) in fact I loved both subjects but in particular what was, in my day, (and probably still is) called experimental physics.  I’ll skip over all the failed exams of my early academic years – (moving swiftly along – I think is the best expression to use here), except to say that on my journey I learned the very valuable lesson that I wasn’t bright enough to do nothing and still pass exams like some of my more academically inclined friends and acquaintances.

Following my Leaving Cert I joined the Army as a Cadet, and two years later I was appointed as an officer in the Signal Corps – that’s the part of the Army that is in charge of communications – mostly electronic communications nowadays – since flags, smoke signals, and pigeons are not used that much anymore!

On my eventual qualification from University with a degree in physics and maths (after, yes, you’ve guessed it – a lot of hard work) I was appointed to a post as an electronic engineer in the Army Signal Corps which I served until I left the Army in 1990.

I spent a number of years in jobs with responsibility for installing/repairing radios and radar systems in air bases, naval bases and ships, and teaching young signalmen, airmen and pilots about radio and radar.  I got some enjoyment and job satisfaction out of it and I suppose I was reasonably competent but I never had a great idea or a wow moment and if I am to be honest I never considered myself to be great at it!

However I enjoyed most of my life in the Army, and am very proud to have made some contribution – however little. I particularly enjoyed the Signal Corps so long as I wasn’t posted in what I considered to be meaningless bureaucratic roles – which I endured for about five out of all my years in uniform.

Now while I was never over-confident about my talents in engineering, radio/radar, etc., I considered myself a good listener as an officer, and I would try to help soldiers (some of whom, in those days, were from not very advantaged backgrounds) with different problems that they had.  I sometimes tried to hide this helping part of me (though I don’t believe that I ever succeeded) because I feared that if I listened to soldiers’ problems, and empathised with them, I might be deemed to be not keeping the distance that officers were expected to keep from other ranks – as military men who were not officers were known those days in the Army. (Of course I didn’t know the meaning of the word empathy in those days).

But nowadays I am very happy with this part of me. And looking back I realise that my thoughts had more to do with my own fears than some imagined attitude of colleagues with whom I generally got on very well and with whom I had and still have long-lasting friendship.

However, as a person that took soldiering seriously, I did connect , in some way, my tendency to empathise with my image of myself as a military man.

Because accepting that acknowledging the pain (or even the potential pain) of others was a gift that I wished to embrace changed my attitude to soldiering – and, thereafter – militarism in general.

I suppose that I might as well say here that I suffer from a rare condition not easy to diagnose.

It is a mixture of naivety, over-enthusiasm, and idealism.  A lot of my motivation to join the Army was patriotic.  Looking back on those days now, I  can say that I was a little disappointed and disillusioned that my idealism wasn’t matched by the career in the public service realities that I encountered all around me, after I was commissioned and began to serve in ordinary barrack life, and in particular as I rose through the ranks.

But change – even though I was not aware of its full implications – was on the way!

A trusted colleague of mine sometimes says:  ‘Nothing changes if nothing changes’. 

But change always involves taking a risk.  I’ve made fairly big changes in my life because I was lucky to have the wherewithal to take a bit of a chance and be surrounded by a loving wife, family and extended family that believed in me and supported me through those changes.

Is there a time in one’s life when one can pinpoint a change, or an epiphany, like Saul on the road to Damascus?  I don’t really know the answer to that question.  Indeed my arguments elsewhere will suggest that a succession of small oft-repeated events usually have a lot more power in effecting change than one big event.

However, that which we remember vividly is probably of some importance in terms of determining the when of change, the tipping point, as I will also be describing elsewhere!

My work on radio and radar when I was stationed in Baldonnel Air Base near Dublin necessitated occasional visits to Shannon Airport (or Ballygireen, which is near Shannon, to be exact) and one day I was on a train from Limerick to Limerick Junction when I picked up a copy of a magazine that someone else had left behind.  This magazine, (an English magazine called Resurgence, (now online of course) was very interesting to me as I was always (and still am) interested in the environment, cycling to work, growing my own, making country wines, hill-walking etc.

It’s hard to believe that this little event first got me thinking about leaving my public service job and heading into (what was to me) the unknown of the community sector.  I found the magazine so interesting and congruent with my views on the world that I became a subscriber.

Long before global warming was topical, Resurgence (and other publications that I came across through it) were warning about the dangers of reliance on fossil fuels, risks posed to the health of humans by big pharma, how corporations and governments are in each other’s pockets, corruption at high levels in society, the link between nuclear power and the military industrial complex, the difference between non-violence and peace, (really eye-opening for me – that), the power of the arms industry and the apparent indifference of the system in the face of serious challenges to our humanity.

Another aspect of the magazine that intrigued me was that it, generally, contained more positive news than negative. This was all very new to me – and very exciting at the time!

Exposed to all this new thinking, I came to believe that humans could do a lot better in respect of resolving conflict than going to war to kill each other.  This is not that easy to argue for.  As a former mentor of mine, Colonel E. D. Doyle, argued, there’s always an army in a country, and if it’s not the army of the country itself – it’s an occupying army.  And people will justifiably say that the reality is that if we are attacked we have to defend ourselves, and we need a Defence Forces to do that ………

Agreed!

However, through reading books, magazines, articles etc. that I never was exposed to in school, (or anywhere else, really, up to that time in my life), I became aware that the principal causes of wars in the world are injustice, exploitation, colonialism, inequality, and the vast majority of people do not want, and gain absolutely nothing from war [1]. 

As a result I began to be more interested in being part of the solution rather than part of the problem.  Now, living in, and enjoying the benefits of the Western World, many of which are due to our economic exploitation of poorer countries, I know that I cannot be totally part of the solution.  But at least by leaving the Army I would have the freedom to choose, and could allow myself to lean strongly in the direction of the solution if I so wished. And through it all I noticed something about myself.

My heroes began to change.

In physics I had come across phenomena known as matter and anti-matter.  I was thinking of this one day and I began to think about who matters to me and who doesn’t.  I know that this is a bit of a play on words but I like words and connections between words so I thought about it a small bit.

In my new reading I discovered an entire world out there exemplified by people like Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks, the black women in the 1950’s who defied apartheid in the USA and sat on seats on buses that were reserved for white people.  And one day I read about a man in India, who, concerned about the environment, planted 100,000 trees.  He just went out and did it himself.  These, I thought, are the people who really matter – to me anyway. 

Who, then, are the anti-matter people?  Which people don’t matter?  Well – I have plenty anti-matter people but I won’t mention them here!

On my journey I discovered something else about myself.  That is, in order to be part (albeit a very small part – but a part nonetheless) of the solution I had to let go of my ego.

What I mean is, because the solution certainly won’t happen in my lifetime, being part of it involves believing in my own limitations, and also humanity itself. In fact, rightly or wrongly, I came to the conclusion that part of the problem is that we want too much to happen too quickly – and in our lifetime if possible.

That belief has implications for this website – and how I present it in general, in the sense that I much prefer change to be like healthy growth, slow and sustainable, than the opposite; i.e. too fast, too much too soon – and ultimately unsustainable.

Growth will happen if conditions are right – and if not, so be it. Maybe they’ll be right some other time, or maybe they’ll never be!

This is simply my gift to the world of protection of vulnerable people, and really, as I state above, it is an invitation.

[1]. I deal with this in more detail in the Chapter on Power and Control in Society.

In the previous post I described how finding a magazine, Resurgence, (and having a train journey ahead with nothing to read) was a kind of trigger (to use a part-military expression) that sent me on my journey.

I’m not going to spend a long time describing that journey in full, but the real journey that brought me to writing this website started when I got a very lucky break.

I applied for a succession of jobs that would enable me to leave the Army and at the same time maintain the relatively modest middle class standard of living to which our family had become accustomed.

Being reasonably proficient at Gaeilge (and pretending to be a lot more proficient than I was) one of the jobs that I was interviewed for was a kind of roving reporter with Radio na Gaeltachta.  Naturally enough I didn’t get it.  Another was with a Boy’s Home in Dublin where, (even to my then very uneducated ears), I was really surprised at the line of questioning at the interview, and decided that in the unlikely event of my being offered the position I wouldn’t take it.  I wasn’t!

However in July 1990 I was called to an interview for a job with Southill Outreach, a streetwork Project based in Limerick City.  (This was my 13^th interview in about two years).  I absolutely loved the idea of this way of working.  I’m not sure why but I think that it was because the word creative was in the ad for the job, and it involved building relationships (out of doors) and potentially doing a lot of outdoor pursuits such as camping, canoeing, hill-walikng, even horse-riding or soccer etc. all of which I liked anyway.

I was called to a second interview in August.  I got a letter in September to say that I had got the job of Project Worker and that I was starting on a certain date.

When I arrived on the job the first day the Chairman of the Board informed me that the person who got the job of Project Leader had not turned up, and asked me if I’d take it on.  With a bit of trepidation, I did so, and since then, (well, I can’t say that I never looked back) but if I did I certainly didn’t look back that much.

The only education that I had had at that time in the field of helping people in distress was a Basic Counselling Course in Cork Counselling Centre which I had done in my own time while attached to the Naval Service in Haulbowline near Cork city.  I had enjoyed this Course very much and I learned a lot on it.  And to me, at that time, it seemed a lot more than basic! I had also been to therapy myself, and had got involved in self-help groups and small one-day courses in helping people.

In addition to formal and informal training I had read copiously on the subject – many radical, (and to me anyway) profoundly eye-opening books such as The Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Friere (which I already referenced); Anarchism by George Woodcock and, what I consider to be a very inspiring book for community workers, Why We Can’t Wait by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to mention but a few.

When I immersed myself in the world inhabited by probation officers, social workers, teachers, experienced youth workers and such professionals I was not at all confident.

However, right from the start, I always felt that I had something special to offer the young people that were to form the target group, a moniker that I felt was funny having come from the Army, where targets were things we fired bullets at with the long-term aim of getting better at hurting other people. (That’s the last military type reference – I promise) ……..

But in my new job it meant something completely different. And ……. I got it!

What I got was that in order to build relationships I would have to meet the young people where they were at – and where they were at was not where I would like them to be.

In fact, where they were at, at first meeting, was often an unreasonable, angry, anxious and irrational place.

To recognise that irrationality might have a role in healing was one of the most valuable learnings of my early years in supporting very hurt people. (I will return to this theme later in the website).

Finally, in this bit about me, when working with families who seem to be excluded from the many positive aspects of life that the vast majority of the population take for granted, I often have there must be a better way moments.

(Maybe) because of this, I often have different feelings about things than that which prevails in the mainstream.  For example, some years ago, when all the country was celebrating the passing of the Referendum to enshrine children’s rights in the Constitution, I felt sad – because it says so much about us that we have to have a referendum to enshrine rights of vulnerable people in the law.

I know that there are realities out there which demand that we do this – but I just felt sad about it.

Another thing about me is that usually, instead of complaining about what is, I dream of what might be.  This kind of keeps me going because I generally don’t like complaining.  If I can’t do anything about something that I don’t like (such as bad weather or my mobile phone helpline) there’s not much point in complaining too much anyway.

If it is something that I can do something about I find that complaining without doing something actually depresses me more than the thing itself.

This is different to sounding off or expressing my frustration at something now and again – I do plenty of that!