An educational experience

NEW LIFE:A childhood accident meant Ricky Walsh's eyesight deteriorated to blindness, but that hasn't stopped him from going to university in his 40s

ONE MORNING, when he was 28, Ricky Walsh woke up and realised that he had gone blind. His first concern though, was for his wife, who was beside him, cradling their four-week-old son.

“Kay was feeding the baby and she asked was I getting up to make the breakfast and I said I’d get up in a few minutes,” recalls Walsh of the morning back in 1981.

“So when she finished feeding the baby and he was back in the cot so that she wouldn’t drop him, I explained to her then that I couldn’t see.”

Losing his sight so suddenly was life-changing, but with the right attitude and the support of a wife who wouldn’t let him “sit in the soft corner”, he went on to master computers, work in the media and earn a college degree. And he wants to encourage other people with disabilities to follow their dreams of further education.

Walsh is matter-of-fact about losing his sight, which started at the age of 10 when he was growing up in Cavan. A childhood accident damaged one eye, but he insists it didn’t affect his schoolwork. “I never noticed because the one eye I had was fabulous,” he recalls. “I was the same as any other child.”

After he left school, Walsh worked on building sites and then started building for himself. He married Kay and they eventually had four children. But it was shortly after the eldest, David, was born that Walsh lost the sight in his working eye.

“It was glaucoma, and it came over in the space of a few hours,” he explains. Following the sudden onset of blindness, he became restless at home, so his brother-in-law gave him a head start on learning the guitar. “I thought if I can do this I can do whatever I want with it,” he recalls. “So I practised it as a day job and then I started making a living playing it in pubs.”

He and Kay opened a hotel, but after the business collapsed in 1991, Walsh found himself at a loose end. “I was moping around the house and my wife, as usual, said she wasn’t having any of this and she signed me up for a back-to-work course.”

The course involved computers, but the instructor didn’t know how to train a blind person to use them, so Walsh took the initiative. “After an hour or two I got a little bit fed up of sitting around listening to everyone else talking about these computers and I said this is like a typewriter and I started tapping at the keyboard,” he recalls. “I memorised the lines of the keyboard and by lunchtime I had typed in the alphabet. Then by four o’clock the next day I was typing the alphabet backwards.”

His newfound skill set him up for further training in computers at the National Council for the Blind in Ireland, and Walsh eventually got a job in the Meath Chronicle in 1995, where he currently works selling advertising.

But there was still an itch to be scratched: Walsh had always wanted to go to university. And he realised at the age of 46 it was time to practice what he preached. “I have a great love for young people who have disabilities and for their parents, because a lot of people have shown me an awful lot of love,” explains Walsh, who co-founded People With Disabilities in Ireland. “And I am always encouraging parents of children with disabilities to send their children to get a proper education.”

So he rang Oscail, the national centre for distance learning at Dublin City University, and set about enrolling. Audiobooks meant he could access texts, and he updated his computer skills with the help of his friends, teacher Loreta Conaty and technical expert Paul Traynor.

Last year Walsh graduated with a BA in humanities. “I wanted to show that if I, at the age of 46, could learn a computer and complete a third-level course, then it should be up to any young person with a disability who had the appetite for it to go and do it,” he says, adding that there was a message there for parents too.

“A parent of a young person with a disability can also be their biggest enemy because they can be too protective towards them,” says Walsh. “The best thing those parents can do is give the child their head because they are more than capable of looking after themselves with a little bit of extra training and confidence-building.”

He is now doing a theology course and would ultimately like to train as a counsellor to work with people who suddenly face disability. “There’s a serious amount of people who get up in the morning and go out and come home in wheelchairs or brain damaged from motor accidents,” he says. “And you’ll always run to the soft corner if you can get away with it and say ‘poor me’, but that’s one thing my wife never let me do.”

But with the right backup and encouragement, many people with disabilities can further their education from home if they wish, says Walsh.

“If they don’t have the confidence to leave home then the way to do it is the Open University or Oscail,” he says, lauding the support he got from the team at DCU. “They are the people who should be getting clapped on the back, not me. I only did what I wanted to do anyway.”

• Oscail is based at DCU and offers a range of undergraduate degrees in arts, science and nursing, and postgraduate courses in operations management, internet and information systems. Visit www.dcu.ie/oscail, e-mail oscail.student@dcu.ie or tel: 01-7005481