Not everyone has what it takes to be a hero

It was instinct kicking in. What he had learnt at swimming lessons when a little boy, says Callum Keane (16) who is being hailed a hero after rescuing a young boy from drowning in the River Boyne.

A group of five youths aged 11 and 12 were swimming near Swynnerton Lodge when one of the boys got into difficulty. Callum was walking past with girlfriend Grace Clarke when they heard the boy's cry for help. The Navan teen says he "acted on instinct" when, without thinking, he jumped in to save the young swimmer, potentially risking his own life. His proud family and friends and neighbours — and all of us further afield — have praised Callum as "an amazing chap to do what he did".

Elsewhere, a miraculous rescue on Galway Bay brought 16 hours of searching to a euphoric end, as cousins Sara Feeney (23) and Ellen Glynn (17) were brought safely to shore. The pair had been swept away by a sudden wind while paddle boarding.

Claddagh fisherman and former Lifeboat shore crew member Patrick Oliver and 18-year-old son Morgan were the heroes of the hour after they discovered the two women clinging to a lobster pot.

What the story of these two young women and their rescue and that of the quick thinking of Callum Keane show us is the remarkable resilience that is part and parcel of human nature, and the unflinching heroism of a young 16-year-old. It's that something, that indomitable spirit, that 'grace' if you like, that comes to the fore when we are faced with a matter of life or death.

A hero displays courage and self-sacrifice for the greater good, putting others first, even at their own peril. Callum Keane did just that.

Meanwhile, how can we account for the resilience that saw the two Galway women cling courageously to hope for 16 hours?

Throughout the night, as the cousins clung to the paddle boards they had lashed together, they endured lightning, torrential rain, choppy seas and spotted “many boats, helicopters, lights shining on the sea surface so close”.

Their spirits, they say, were kept buoyant by a meteor shower, dolphins leaping out of the water, and phosphorescence, the luminous glow of millions of tiny marine organisms. Together they talked, they sang anything they could, to keep their hopes alive. If fear was seeping in, one would reassure the other. They took it in turns to have short naps.

The young women say they knew if "we stayed there we would be found, but we also knew if another night fell we would not make it”.

We come into the world confronted by what philosopher William James famously called "a blooming buzzing confusion" and we must somehow organise such chaos into a reasonably stable and meaningful personal world. And, as Carl Jung so well understood, our Self must deal not only with external challenges but also the challenges that come "from inside us".

Some argue we are born heroic or weak; I don't hold with that. I believe we are all born with the tremendous capacity to be anything, but we get shaped by our circumstances — by the family or the culture or the time in which we happen to grow up, which are accidents of birth; whether we grow up in a war zone or peaceful times, in poverty rather than prosperity.

To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, every reasonable man and woman is a potential hero or potentially the opposite. Such depends upon nurture and character, while what he or she does and what we think of what they do depends on upon circumstance.

We humans are intrinsically tough and resilient. The unique evolutionary path we have taken relies predominantly on learning, openness, flexibility, and adaptability. We survive, thrive even, in every conceivable environment. We have created a bewildering variety of social and cultural realities, where we endlessly experiment and reinvent ourselves. That creates individual character; what sets Callum Keane apart. Not everyone has it in them to be a hero.

One wonders, though, how does our psyche withstand such as war, crime, brutality? Life-threatening situations? Why do some individuals live through such experiences with their spirit relatively intact? I don't know. Perhaps it is that which Catholicism calls ‘grace'.

Certainly, human resilience comes to the fore when we are faced with extreme situations to which we have little time to react; situations that faced Callum Keane and Sarah and Ellen.

And which they came through triumphantly, their spirit unbroken.

Read Paul Hopkins every week in the Meath Chronicle