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Tony Walsh, Wecxford Town. Photograph: Patrick Browne<\/p>\nThere\u00a0was a day I decided there was no point anymore. I wanted to end all the pain. I was nine. My dad had died less than a year earlier.<\/p>\n
He\u2019d had a run-in with our primary school sometime previously. He took my sisters out of the school, I was left. The teacher took all his anger out on me \u2014 beating me regularly in an empty classroom.<\/p>\n
On April Fools\u2019 Day, the teacher told me go out, remove the donkey from the school\u2019s front garden. All the children laughing at the window, he telling me go behind this bush, go behind that. It was pretty brutal. There were other angry people in my life too.<\/p>\n
I loved my mother but she was busy \u2014 big family, she\u2019d lost her husband, had the farm to look after.<\/p>\n
It was 1960s Ireland \u2014 people didn\u2019t talk, there was no comfort, understanding. If you spoke about taking your life then, you\u2019d be told \u2018it\u2019s a sin\u2019. They\u2019d stop you talking.<\/p>\n
There was a densely overgrown place nobody ever went, neglected, thick shrubs, trees, and furze grew there. I didn\u2019t want anybody to find me. I crawled into this place \u2014 inside a kind of cave I could stand in.<\/p>\n
I had come there prepared \u2014 to end it all. I sat for a moment. And just exactly then I heard the sound of a dog panting \u2014 my dog, Minnie, came running in where I\u2019d crawled, my little border collie came running, right into my arms.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s amazing, looking back \u2014 a dog the reason I\u2019m actually here today. I remember hugging her \u2026 just connecting with a living creature meant so much, words not needed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And somehow all the nasty experiences melted away in that moment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n Minnie gave me some value \u2014 she wanted to be with me, I was important to her. So vital I had her \u2014 she was of more value to me than any human at that time.\n <\/p>\n
I had to get her home, get her away from there. It was about minding her \u2014 not wanting her to find me gone. It\u2019s strange. I never went back there.<\/p>\n
I was able to have a little more resilience then, I never sunk to that level of vulnerability again. She was like a little spirit sent to save me. I look back with gratitude, to her, whatever forces drove her to me.<\/p>\n
An amazing little dog \u2014 she\u2019d sit at the crossroads waiting for me to come home from school. The minute she\u2019d see me, she\u2019d run at speed, raising a cloud of dust.<\/p>\n
Tony Walsh, Wecxford Town. Photograph: Patrick Browne<\/p>\n
An English family came to live locally. The son was put sitting beside me at school. He was rejected because he was English \u2014 I because the schoolmaster rejected me.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He told his father about the beatings I was getting. The father came in one day, gave out to the schoolmaster in front of everybody, said if he touched me again, he might as well be touching his own son \u2014 and if he touched his own son, he\u2019d kill him.<\/p>\n
I couldn\u2019t believe someone was actually standing up for me, prepared to protect me from a bully.<\/p>\n
The man went to my mother, told her about the beatings. A new school had opened in the village \u2014 that same September I started there. The new master took me under his wing, I couldn\u2019t believe things became so different.<\/p>\n
He brought me with him one day to a little wooded area to find a young boy who wasn\u2019t coming to school. The headmaster hunkered down, asked \u2018what\u2019s wrong?\u2019.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I saw care I hadn\u2019t seen elsewhere, the attention he gave \u2014 saw how effective a human can be to care for someone else, to listen. And that he brought me: someone the boy could relate to.<\/p>\n
Seeing this child, my age, expressing words about fearing people too, seeing the hopelessness in his expression \u2014 in a strange way I didn\u2019t feel so alone anymore.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t see it then, but looking back, it was just a series of \u2026 like messages that suggested I had to live, for whatever reason.<\/p>\n
Almost from then I felt a great empathy for people suffering pain.<\/p>\n
Those experiences helped me along a path to understanding suicide in terms of a clifftop: People arrive to take their lives, generally others run along the clifftop to save them \u2014 we think that\u2019s being proactive.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The reality is it\u2019s being present along the journey to the clifftop that makes the difference.<\/p>\n
I went to work in the prison service. Promotion never interested me. Helping others leave prison in a better state \u2014 rather than be held in suspended animation \u2014 did.<\/p>\n
That I was guided towards helping others all triggered from that long-ago point in my life \u2014 the becoming aware of what it would mean, to help others in pain come out the other side.<\/p>\n
Tony Walsh is on the board of It\u2019s Good to Talk, which offers affordable, professional counselling in the Wexford area.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ahead of World Mental Health Day, Wexford-based Tomhaggard Clean Coasts Group donated a wooden, shipwrecked chair they had carefully restored to the charity \u2014 for It\u2019s Good to Talk, the \u2018battered but not broken\u2019 chair is a symbol of resilience and hope for those struggling with mental health.
\n Tomhaggard Clean Coasts Group will hold a Halloween-themed coffee morning fundraiser for It\u2019s Good to Talk this Sunday, October 26, in Kilmore Hall, Kilmore, Co Wexford. itsgood2talk.ie<\/a><\/p>\n