Young crash survivor advises others to drive more safely

GROWING up, Richard Alcorn was mad about fire trucks – not the toy ones his friends had to make do with, but the real deal.

His dad, James, was a fireman and Richard’s very own personal hero. But just how much of a hero Richard wouldn’t really appreciate until, at the age of 19, his Opel Corsa car smashed into an oncoming Mercedes.

James was one of the first on the scene and managed to squeeze into the back seat of the mangled Corsa and secure his son’s head and neck until an ambulance arrived.

His actions probably saved Richard from permanent paralysis, because the severity of the teen’s injuries were such that few who are hurt to the same extent live to tell the tale, at least not without spinal damage.

As it was, while the other driver walked away virtually unharmed, Richard’s injuries were shocking. “I broke pretty much every bone in my body,” he says. “And I lost my right arm below the elbow.”

Four years on, he needs a double hip replacement and is on, as he puts it, “buckets of drugs” for pain.

With more rehabilitation therapy he hopes to be able to walk short distances without his wheelchair but there is a lot of work ahead.

“I probably have about another three years to go,” he says. Recovery for him is a full-time job.

Yet Richard is one of the lucky ones as he has told himself many times. He did so again this week as he sat at home at Horn Head near Dunfanaghy on the western side of Lough Swilly, listening to the news from Inishowen on the far side.

Richard lost a cousin and a friend on the roads too and has seen the effect on their families close up. “You know what the families in Inishowen are going to go through for the rest of their lives. Their families are devastated, destroyed.

“I keep thinking about the driver, too, because he will probably be in a similar boat to myself. It’ll probably be hospitals and surgeries and rehab for a long time, the same as myself. It becomes your life for a long time.”

His accident also took over his family’s life, with his mum, Marine, and dad James, having to devote themselves full-time to him for months on end. “My younger brother was doing the Junior Cert at the time but my parents were all the time with me.

“They pretty much had to move to Dublin full-time, and then when I was let out they were up and down between Donegal and Dublin all the time for my appointments. Then they had to adapt the house for my wheelchair, too, so it put a lot of work on everyone.”

Richard is a positive person and didn’t let his circumstance get him down. “I’ve never been depressed. I thought there was never any sense to it,” he says. But he doesn’t deny the massive impact on his life either.

“At the start, I didn’t really know what was going on, I was on so much medication, but the day I realised I’d lost my arm, it was like, shit – look at this. I realised then how bad I was but it also made me get life into perspective. This is the way I am and that’s it.”

Richard has shared his frank accounts of his experiences with schoolgoers and community groups as part of road safety campaigns.

“I’m not looking for them to feel sorry for me – I’m looking for them to think about themselves. They all have ideas about what they want to do with their lives like I did, and it’s a big shock to the system when that all goes.

“I was doing an apprenticeship but I haven’t been able to work. I’d hope to get back to education and study something the likes of road safety or disability architecture – I’m still only 23 – but we’ll have to see what works out.”

Richard’s mum, Marine, has no doubt her son will work something out.

“He’s just the kind that gets on with it. He’s brilliant in that way.”

But like him, she will never be able to fully move on from the trauma of the accident.

“I can’t even dream about what those parents in Inishowen are going through. I know what Shaun Kelly’s family are feeling because we were in their position and that’s bad enough, but to lose a son, I can’t imagine that.”

Neither she nor Richard allowed themselves dwell on why his accident happened, believing it would not be helpful to keep going over it. “We had really good weather up until the day of the accident when it rained and it was an awful day,” Marine recalls. “People said the rain on the dry road made it slippy but we never really went into it. As long as Richard was alive, that was all that mattered.”

Richard doesn’t remember the crash at all and he cautions against insisting on explanations for the tragedy in Inishowen.

“It’s not going to change things and I can’t see how it would bring comfort to the families. The priority is the families and getting the driver better.”

He still loves cars and one of the first things he did when he was well enough was to get behind the wheel. His modified Ford Mondeo means the world to him.

“My friends were unbelievable – anywhere I wanted to go, there was always lifts – but I wanted my own wheels again. The accident changed me physically but I’m still the same person I was before.”