Brendan O'Connor: Does it count as empathy if you learn it the hard way?

A new book edited by Cillian Murphy features essays and thoughts about empathy from 72 contributors. One of them is broadcaster Brendan O'Connor

'I feel ashamed to say this now, but when my daughter Mary was born with Down syndrome, I knew my life was ruined'. Picture: Bríd O'Donovan

I'm not sure. Does it count as empathy if you learn it the hard way?

Is there anything noble in gaining an understanding of other people’s lives only because your own life becomes another person’s life?

Is that empathy? Or is that cheating?

I made it through school without knowing anyone gay.

Strange isn’t it? That out of the hundreds of guys (only guys) I came up with, not one of them was gay.

There were no gay guys, just some guys who were accused of being ‘benders’, as banter.

Quiet guys often. That was what passed for harmless fun back then.

But it would be college before I met anyone who was gay.

Now, I can imagine what it must have been like for some of those guys in school, where nobody was gay. Not one.

I knew one guy who was Egyptian. One brown guy. There was nobody black. Nobody in school, nobody in the area.

We grew up with people like us. And we just assumed everyone was like us.

Maybe there were gay people and black people in Dublin.

I didn’t know anyone with a disability either. I saw them all right.

I saw the odd person with Down syndrome, around the place with their parents, who seemed older than the rest of our parents.

And when we would go swimming in Lota, sometimes you might catch a glimpse of one of the residents, maybe behind a window, locked away in their world.

At Christmas Joan Murphy would bring us out to the Cork Spastic Clinic for a concert.

Joan Murphy was one of those women who might not have talked much about empathy, but who had a heart as big as Ireland, and who bled what we now know as empathy all over every situation she went into.

Joan taught me piano and singing and elocution. But Joan also taught me other things.

Like when we went to the Spastic Clinic, and we were as terrified of the kids there as they were of us.

Joan treated them just like she treated us, and spoke to them as if they were just like us, and laughed with them, and showered them with warmth, as if they were just like us, and was stern with them sometimes too, as if they were just like us.

I never really cracked the piano, and it took a long time for some of Joan’s other lessons to sink in.

I feel ashamed to say this now, but when my daughter Mary was born with Down syndrome, I knew my life was ruined.

I remember I rang my brother in America and told him.

My life is ruined.

It’s imprinted on me, the slow emotion replay of that day, as the mood changed in the operating theatre where the caesarean was being done.

She came out not floppy, which is what you want.

But then they brought her over to the table, and started looking at her, and talking amongst themselves, and suddenly the colour drains out of everything.

And when the doctor said Trisomy 21 to us, in heavily accented English, we didn’t know what he was talking about.

And then it became clear, but I knew this couldn’t be happening, because this was the kind of thing that happened to other people.

These things did not happen to people like us.

That sounds harsh. But that was how it seemed back then, because back then I knew nothing.

And since then, I have lived someone else’s life.

And maybe in some ways it’s a harder life, but it’s also a better life. Now I understand so much more.

And now, when I see people who look pityingly at us, the way I might have looked pityingly at a family like ours before, I try to be kind, because I know they know nothing.

I can tell they think that it’s nice that we are doing our best, with the cross we have to bear in life, but that really we are just pretending. They think we are just trying to get on with it.

They also often think that we are good people, more saintly, more patient.

We are not. But we think we know things they don’t know. Because we think we know a different kind of love, a love that most of them will never know.

It can be a challenging kind of love, but that only serves to make it a more practical, muscular kind of love. It’s not always fluffy. Maybe it’s love as it should be, hard work sometimes.

We think we have a clarity that lots of those people will never have.

I think I know what true unconditional love is.

I know love that forces you to go to war for the loved one.

I love smart people, but I don’t tend to judge people too much based on their intelligence — though maybe on their ignorance.

I am free from worrying what my kids will achieve on any conventional metric. I know that the only thing that matters is that they are happy.

If I had known my daughter 40 years ago, I might have been afraid of her, if indeed I ever even came across her.

I might have seen her through a window when I went swimming, locked in that other depressing world that people like her inhabited, that smelled like hospital, and that looked like the beige of institutions.

She has given me many gifts. But perhaps the most important one is that my definition of people like me has broadened, and I meet them all where they are, looking neither up nor down, nor awkwardly at them.

The broken people are my people too now, and the ones who have fixed themselves and come out the other side more interesting and open, and the mad ones, and the ones who don’t fit in, and the ones who struggle, and the ones who have had to learn unlimited love, the ones who are challenged, who don’t get given a chance, who are happy despite not having what we are taught is the right kind of life, the ones who have to fight, the self-pitying ones, the self-destructive ones.

And it’s not quite empathy, and it’s slightly cheating, and I don’t always manage to practise it, and I’m challenged every day by it.

But the best we can all do is to try to understand that our common humanity doesn’t reside in perfection.

It’s in our faults, and our failings, and our shocks and the mishaps that nearly break us, and in our weaknesses that demand of us more courage, and in our shame and our difference.

And maybe the best we can do is try to look across at each other at the same level and silently acknowledge, while we are all fucked up in different ways, and while we all have different stuff, and some of us have better luck and some of us have worse luck, we are all brothers and sisters in our common fuckedupness.

So we don’t need to feel sorry for each other.

We just need to remember that we all have our story that got us to here, and I could be you if I had your bad luck or good luck. And you could be me.

-This is an extract from Ionbhá: The Empathy Book for Ireland, edited by Cillian Murphy and published by Mercier.

The contributors include Michael D. Higgins, Hozier, Tolu Makay, The Edge, Rachael Blackmore, Blindboy Boatclub, Mary Coughlan, Clodagh Finn, Katy Hyland, Imelda May, Brendan O’Connor, Louise O’Neill, and Valerie Biden Owens.

The wide range of contributions to Ionbhá is intended to act like a compass, illustrating what is really important in life, that no matter how big or small, empathetic actions have a massive impact. 100% of all proceeds from the book will go directly to delivering the Activating Social Empathy education programme in Irish schools and youth work organisations.

• Ionbhá: The Empathy Book for Ireland (Mercier) is out now.