Funny, daring, and challenging to the end

THERE is a piece of wisdom that says you get to know a foreign country either in the space of three weeks or 30 years.

It’s the same with people - you can know someone all your life and not really know them at all, or you can meet someone and absorb their essence in a few short weeks.

It was a bit like that with Martin Barry. I never grew up with him, never went to school with him, never knew him in college and could never pretend to have been an old friend. He was, in any event, a good bit younger. Yet, he had a profound effect on me and on those around him in a way that few people have.

It is five years since he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a debilitating condition that attacks the nervous system. He bore the news with stoicism and, at first, entertained the hope it was something he could live with. However, his youth and, ironically, his good health otherwise, conspired to spread the disease rapidly.

From being a simple inconvenience, it quickly emerged that the condition would eventually deprive him of his mobility and point the way to his eventual demise. The vast majority of people with MS go on to lead long and fruitful lives. Martin was an unfortunate exception.

Last June, he was still mobile enough to spend a week in Croatia and throughout the summer he still managed to get around with the use of an electric wheelchair.

Martin wielded that chair like it was a Ferrari and anyone caught in the slip-stream quickly learned to do a bit of dirty dancing or get out of the way. I can still picture him doing ‘wheelies’ in my kitchen and sending the dog scurrying for cover.

Martin was one smart guy. A graduate in philosophy from University College Cork, he quickly became an accomplished freelance journalist and over the past year, he produced and presented World View, a radio programme with Campus Radio in Cork.

He was also well travelled and enjoyed friendships and relationships in Dublin, London and Tokyo, sharing flats with motley characters.

Last year I asked him to write an article about the ups and downs of having flat-mates as a student. Some of it was gut-wrenchingly hilarious, just like himself on many occasions. He divided his companions into various categories, from the slovenly to the Neat Freak.

His was a dazzling intelligence allied to infectious laughter - the kind of guffaw that could be heard from one end of a bar to the other.

The radio programme was made for him. He was certainly opinionated - everything from politics to the war in Iraq to affairs of the nation would excite him and elicit a trenchant, yet considered view. The same went for art, music, movies and the lamentable state of the health service, something he knew from bitter experience.

He rarely spoke to me of his membership of Dignitas, yet he was adamant it was the right decision.

He was never po-faced though and knew how to enjoy himself, sometimes to the extent of behaving outrageously. Like a charging bull, he once sped from one end of a late-night restaurant to the other, crashing through and shattering the glass doors, to the astonishment of the clientele and the consternation of the management.

It didn’t take a feather out of him. “That was great craic,” he said, surveying the wreckage.

That’s an image I will always have of Martin - funny, daring, defiant and challenging to the end. His family and his many friends will greatly miss him - and so will I.