What a Difference a Day Makes: 'I was prepared to end it all — my dog is the reason I'm here today'

Counsellor and author Tony Walsh tells Helen O’Callaghan about a series of events that took place – and particularly one standout day – when he was about nine years old, and how from that he learned the value of empathy and compassion, attitudes that became central to how he lives his life.

Pictured is Tony Walsh, Wexford Town, Tony is pictured with his dog Ivan, and his book. Photograph: Patrick Browne

There was 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.

He’d 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 — beating me regularly in an empty classroom.

On April Fools’ Day, the teacher told me go out, remove the donkey from the school’s 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.

I loved my mother but she was busy — big family, she’d lost her husband, had the farm to look after.

It was 1960s Ireland — people didn’t talk, there was no comfort, understanding. If you spoke about taking your life then, you’d be told ‘it’s a sin’. They’d stop you talking.

There was a densely overgrown place nobody ever went, neglected, thick shrubs, trees, and furze grew there. I didn’t want anybody to find me. I crawled into this place — inside a kind of cave I could stand in.

I had come there prepared — to end it all. I sat for a moment. And just exactly then I heard the sound of a dog panting — my dog, Minnie, came running in where I’d crawled, my little border collie came running, right into my arms.

It’s amazing, looking back — a dog the reason I’m actually here today. I remember hugging her … just connecting with a living creature meant so much, words not needed. 

And somehow all the nasty experiences melted away in that moment. 

Minnie gave me some value — she wanted to be with me, I was important to her. So vital I had her — she was of more value to me than any human at that time.

I had to get her home, get her away from there. It was about minding her — not wanting her to find me gone. It’s strange. I never went back there.

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.

An amazing little dog — she’d sit at the crossroads waiting for me to come home from school. The minute she’d see me, she’d run at speed, raising a cloud of dust.

Tony Walsh, Wecxford Town. Photograph: Patrick Browne

An English family came to live locally. The son was put sitting beside me at school. He was rejected because he was English — I because the schoolmaster rejected me. 

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 — and if he touched his own son, he’d kill him.

I couldn’t believe someone was actually standing up for me, prepared to protect me from a bully.

The man went to my mother, told her about the beatings. A new school had opened in the village — that same September I started there. The new master took me under his wing, I couldn’t believe things became so different.

He brought me with him one day to a little wooded area to find a young boy who wasn’t coming to school. The headmaster hunkered down, asked ‘what’s wrong?’. 

I saw care I hadn’t seen elsewhere, the attention he gave — 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.

Seeing this child, my age, expressing words about fearing people too, seeing the hopelessness in his expression — in a strange way I didn’t feel so alone anymore.

I didn’t see it then, but looking back, it was just a series of … like messages that suggested I had to live, for whatever reason.

Almost from then I felt a great empathy for people suffering pain.

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 — we think that’s being proactive. 

The reality is it’s being present along the journey to the clifftop that makes the difference.

I went to work in the prison service. Promotion never interested me. Helping others leave prison in a better state — rather than be held in suspended animation — did.

That I was guided towards helping others all triggered from that long-ago point in my life — the becoming aware of what it would mean, to help others in pain come out the other side.

Tony Walsh is on the board of It’s Good to Talk, which offers affordable, professional counselling in the Wexford area. 

• Ahead of World Mental Health Day, Wexford-based Tomhaggard Clean Coasts Group donated a wooden, shipwrecked chair they had carefully restored to the charity — for It’s Good to Talk, the ‘battered but not broken’ chair is a symbol of resilience and hope for those struggling with mental health.
• Tomhaggard Clean Coasts Group will hold a Halloween-themed coffee morning fundraiser for It’s Good to Talk this Sunday, October 26, in Kilmore Hall, Kilmore, Co Wexford. itsgood2talk.ie
• Meanwhile, Clean Coasts encourages beachgoers to do a #2MinuteBeachClean whenever they visit the beach: exa.mn/beachclean.