Peter Mc Carthy interview copyright Victoria Mary Clarke 2005

Wars are being fought all over the world. On our own streets, people are being stabbed, beaten, shot and bullied regularly. You may think you have nothing to do with this.  You may think of yourself as a peaceful person.  But even peaceful people are capable of expressing anger and hatred.  And even if you don’t actually beat anyone up or kill them, sometimes you want to, which can be just as bad. 
Like the mythological heroes in the stories of old, Peter Mc Carthy is a man who set out to confront and tame a fire-breathing dragon.  That dragon was anger. Peter, a young, middle class Dublin man in his early thirties, was attacked on the street, by a gang.  It was a violent attack, and he was angry and he wanted to get revenge, which is only natural.  But he discovered that fighting fire with fire only makes the flames burn out of control. 
‘I fell out with my brother, pretty badly,’ Peter explains to me, after some hesitation.  ‘ And  I got angrier and angrier and angrier.  And one night, I got glassed, coming out of a restaurant.  It was pretty nasty.  I was walking past these guys and they said something to the guy I was with and he said something back and I walked around them, so they saw me as the weaker one and they went for me.  I started running and then I turned around and got the glass in my face.  There was blood everywhere.’
          Around the same time, Peter was involved in two car crashes, both very bad.  After that, he went to a healer called        Shane Murnaghan. 
‘Shane said that I had been avoiding conflict all my life and that I was full of fear. There was a pattern running through my life, which had started at school.  I had been bullied all my life.  Once I saw it, I started getting even more angry and I started hating people.  I could feel myself getting more and more aggressive in my mind.  If somebody cut me up in traffic, I felt like pulling over and decking them!’
One day, shortly afterwards, Peter spotted an article about a camp in Thailand where they train people in the Muang Thai style of boxing.  And he decided that was what he had to do.  Train to be a fighter, so he could fight back.  He also decided to make a documentary of the journey.
‘I went into Trailfinders one day in December and bought two tickets and I called my friend Shane Sutton and told him we were going!  When we got there I bought a camera on my credit card and we filmed the whole trip.’
The training was extremely difficult.  The climate is very hot, which made it more difficult. 
‘But most of the problem was the fear of getting into the ring!’  he says.  He chickened out of the first fight that was organised for him.  But when he finally got in the ring, he discovered something surprising.
‘In the actual fight, a strange thing happens.  I didn’t know anything about this before, but it’s the same thing that happens if you are in a car crash.  Your adrenalin surges and you don’t feel the pain.  It’s an amazing natural drug.  You feel like you can do anything.’
AS the documentary, which is now finished shows, Peter actually became quite a good fighter.
‘I won my first fight, knocked the guy out,’ he agrees.  ‘But I was stepping into the ring with a lot of anger.  I made myself think of certain people and that made me mad!’
After having spent three months doing nothing but fighting, Peter felt that he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.  He needed time to himself, a bit of peace and quiet.  So he checked into a monastery.
‘ I went and did a ten day Vipassana meditation.  And I cracked up because I hadn’t stopped to think from the time I got glassed until then and that was three years.  Jesus, I couldn’t believe the stuff that was going on in my head.  I was losing my mind. I stuck it out, because that’s in my character, but I legged it out of there after it was finished!’
The spell in the monastery had a profound effect, however.
‘I realised that I was going the wrong way in my life.  Thinking of your past is an absolute waste of time, it doesn’t do you any good. I feel less fearful now.  Not because I can fight, but because I realise that you cant control everything and when you try to control everything, it controls you.  And if you carry an aggressive energy, you attract aggression.  Forgiving other people is crucial.’
The Buddhists place peace of mind, which means not carrying any ill feelings towards others, at the centre of their philosophy of life.
But forgiving other people can be difficult, I point out.
‘It is one of the most difficult things to do, yes.  But it’s one of the most important things in life, to learn to forgive people, because if you don’t, the only person who suffers is yourself.  If I was angry at some teacher who knocked the shit out of me when I was nine, only I would suffer, he wouldn’t.  I think that dwelling on the past like that drags you down.’
So how do you let go of it?  I ask.
‘It’s difficult.  You have to look at each situation from the other person’s point of view, put yourself in their shoes.  It doesn’t matter how small or how big the offence is.  And that’s really what this documentary is about.  People not being willing to let go of something someone else has done, people wanting to exact revenge.  That is the root of everything that is going on in the world.  People taking sides, wars being fought.’
We live in a country that is full of people who have been wronged, whether it be in an extreme way, such as the victims of child abuse were, or whether it be from having been short-changed or cut up in traffic.  Having made his film, which is called ‘Fight or Flight’, Peter now hopes that those who see the film will also see a way to forgive those wrongs.
‘It is a process.  I still haven’t managed it fully.  Sometimes a car pulls out in front of me and my immediate reaction is to go ‘That fucker!’  But you can count to ten.  I have forgiven the top ten people that I had a really big problem with in my life.  And I am practicing awareness, whenever I catch myself reacting with anger.’
The poster for ‘Fight or Flight’ suggests that you are about to see a film about Thai Boxing.  I was surprised when I saw the film, that it’s about something else.  And not only did it have the effect of making me look at violence in a new way, but also that it made me cry, which I wasn’t expecting.  Peter smiles, when I tell him this.
‘  That is what we were hoping for!’ he admits.
‘Fight or Flight’ will be screened as part of the Kerry Film Festival on Friday October 28