'Positivity has helped. I've adjusted to the situation as it is, I'm lucky to be alive'

It would be easy for Richard Harrahill to wallow in self-pity.

After all, you might think, fate has not been kind to him, at least not in recent years.
You could peruse his CV and correctly conclude that he lived a full-on, active life until one morning in March 2015 when he woke up only to discover he simply couldn’t get out of bed.
His wife Mary had gone to work and he was alone.
“I couldn’t move from the bed, I couldn’t even get to the phone,” he recalls.
He was 58 at the time and the stark realisation dawned on him as the minutes and hours passed that he was having a stroke.
“I don’t remember much about what happened in the sense that that morning I didn’t feel that particularly well and I said I’d lie on a bit and I got the attack when I was in bed,” he recalls.
“I was lucky enough too, I reckon, because at least I was lying down, I didn’t fall somewhere, I wasn’t out in the car, then anything could have happended to me. I don’t remember an awful lot about it from the time I got the attack.”
Richard sits at his kitchen table looking out through the large window at the back of his house in Dunsany. The view is a very pastoral, pleasant one.
On one side of the bungalow is a large wood, the giant trees displaying their newly acquired leaves; their summer finery.
The house is where Richard and Mary have lived happily since soon after they were married in 1988 - and they wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.
They lived busy lives until that March morning when everything changed and Richard received what he terms “the dunk.”
Now with his right side paralysed Richard has had to build a new life for himself. Somebody who travelled the world he is now confined, for lenghty spells, to a wheelchair and restricted in terms of what he can do and where he can go.
Which allows him plenty of leverage to wallow in self-pity and bemoan the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” Right?
Well, no. Wrong actually. The Dunsany resident is one of those people who doesn’t do self pity, his morale clearly sustained by an infectious positivity; a willingness and natural inclination to always to look on the bright side of life.
Not only does he not feel pity for himself, this most gregarious, most affable of men, considers himself blessed (he has a strong Catholic faith) to have made it through the storm.
During a conversation with him in his pleasant home Harrahill frequently refers to how “lucky” he is; how grateful he feels for what has come his way despite the events of that March morning.
“I’ve seen over the years so many people, young people, old people, get struck down with various types of illness, it just happens and you have to accept that, it happens and I’m delighted that I am as good as I am.
“Not been able to talk would have been really, really difficult, I don’t know how....” his words trailing off as he looks out his window as if imagining an appalling vista. “I can talk to people as good as I ever did, I can communicate and that’s so important,” he adds picking up the thread.
Originally from Tipperary, Richard is one of three in a family that also includes his sister Mary and brother Gerry, who was appointed a Revenue Commissioner in 2014.
Richard was clearly a bright boy at school and he secured a place in the Civil Service. He transferred to the then Department of Posts and Telegraphs, later worked with Eircom, all the time rising up through the ranks, finishing as head of financial and administrative systems.
Harrahill also loved his sport, still does. He recalls just two weeks after moving to Dublin in 1974 he attended an international soccer game at Dalymount Park between the Republic of Ireland and the Soviet Union.
Ireland rocked the Soviets - and the soccer world - by winning 3-0. Don Givens helped himself to a hat-trick in what was a momentous moment for Irish soccer. Young Harrahill was hooked.
For the next 35 years and more he followed the Boys and Green all around the world, with Mary, who is from Kerry, more often than not by his side.
“Mary would come with me for 85 or 90 per cent of the time. It was an opportunity to see the world. We went to countries we would never have gone to otherwise. You’d never have gone to Armenia, for example, or Iran, places that were great to see.”
In 1988 when Ray Houghton put the ball in the English net in Germany, Richard and Mary were on the first day of their honeymoon in Barbados. “An awful lot of people remember my wedding anniversary because it was the day before the England game, it’s always remembered,”
When Ireland got to the World Cups in 1994 and 2002, Richard was there. He recalls travelling with the Irish players on trips, having meals with them even. How times have changed.
They were fun-filled days. They remain treasured moments, precious memories.
Then there is his beloved Dunsany GFC. Once the Harrahills settled in the parish they committed themselves to contributing to the local community. Richard became a prominent member of the club, serving as chairman for 14 years, up to shortly before his stroke.
The club suffered numerous setbacks in a long and cherished quest to land the JFC title. Yet despite the pain there was also plenty of laughs.
A lover of music Richard was also a prominent member of the Trim Musicial Society and filled positions in Meath GAA Co Board. Even though he retired from Telecom Eireann in his early fifties he was always busy, engrossed in some project or other.
From time to time his wife Mary - who works as the TV licence manager at An Post - would remind him to have a health check. “She would say to me, rightly, you’re at that age when you should have a check up once a year or so and I’d say the usual thing thing ‘next week,’ ‘next month,’ I’d put it off. I felt fine although I was overweight. I knew that.”
Then, on that March morning he received “the dunk.” The stroke changed everything. Well, almost everything. One thing it didn’t undermine was Richard Harrahill’s innate optimism.

“That outlook, that positivity has helped,” he adds. “I’ve adjusted to the situation as it is, I’m lucky to be alive.”
A few weeks ago just over 160 people showed up for Richard’s 60th birthday bash. He treated them all to a sit down meal in the Ardboyne Hotel.
“People were very good during the last couple of years and I thought the 60th birthday was the best way to mark it. I wanted to have a decent bash.
“There were various people there who sang, people from the (Trim) Musical Society, including Jane Lynch who played keyboards, and lots of people from various organisations who were good at singing.
“I didn’t have a band because bands can ruin conversation. I used to play the accordian and piano unfortunately I can’t do that now, I sang a couple of songs myself. The idea was that people could chat and enjoy a few songs.”
The night was his way of saying ‘thank you’ for the support he received in his darkest hour. Friends, neighbours, family - and of course his Mary - were, he says, “terrific” in helping him dealing with a crisis that arrived out of left field and floored him, but only for a while.
Now he’s back, feeling good, like his old self again. He might never move around like he used to, he accepts that, but as far as Richard Harrahill is concerned life’s too short to wallow in regrets, what might-have-beens or debilitating self pity.
Life is for living.