There were so many times I started a note like this to Paul Harty last year over mundane issues such as missing homework or behavioural misdemeanours committed by my son. Sadly, this will be the last note I will ever begin in such a fashion.
Mr Harty was taken from this world on the afternoon of Saturday 13 January, and in my book, it will now be Saturday the 13th that will forever be a day of misfortune. And what a misfortune it was.
You see, some children are lucky enough to have had a Mr Harty in their lives. I didn’t, at least not until university. Mr Harty enriched his students’ lives in a way that only one with a true passion for one’s profession can touch the lives of others.
The Dead Poets’ Society cliché springs to mind but comparing real life events to those on the silver screen somehow does not do Mr Harty’s passion for his job justice. Mr Harty was the real McCoy as they would say in his native Ireland.
I did not know Mr Harty on a personal level, only on the professional one, and I wished I had had the chance to have known him more. As such, I am only qualified to speak of Mr Harty as the father of one of his students. But his students, on the other hand, knew him well and they adored him.
Mr Harty was a strict disciplinarian and I can still vividly recall the look of shock and awe on parents’ faces, mine included no doubt, when he handed us a letter on our orientation meeting before the first day of school. The note went something to the effect that: your sons will not be mollycoddled, they will be responsible for their own things, they will be responsible for their own homework and that he will, to cut it short, take neither crap nor excuses.
This was reflected in what seemed to have been an inordinate amount of lessons Mr Harty gave his boys on the Spartans, and in the military tales he would tell his students – tales that to this day, even after Mr Harty’s passing, my son will not relay because they are “Classified”.
But once I got past that no-nonsense exterior, what I found in my own experience was a man who poured every ounce of his soul into his profession, a man who took his mission to form, nurture and inspire young minds and to set them on the right path in life not only as a vocation but also as a calling.
Mr Harty, you were more than a teacher. You were a mentor and an inspiration to your students, their parents and no doubt to your colleagues as well.
Speculation on Mr Harty’s cause of death is somewhat irrelevant, superfluous and perhaps gratuitous. But allow me to observe that by the looks of it, it appears that Mr Harty, upon falling ill at the wheel, steered his car onto the pavement and into a roadside wall instead of allowing it to careen into potential oncoming traffic, or leaving it in the middle of the road where it would have constituted a danger.
That, of course, is only speculation but to my mind, it is a mark of the kind of man Mr Harty was.
It is something of an anomaly that a newspaper’s editor takes figurative pen to paper to write a piece such as this, but an extraordinary man warrants an extraordinary measure.
At 56-years of-age, Mr Harty had so much more to contribute and his loss is a loss for all the other children that were destined to cross his path.
Friday’s Famous Faces was one of his students’ favourite activities, for which they were tasked to read up on the outstanding people who have shaped the world as we know it. Mr Harty, you deserve to have been up on that wall with the other greats from every walk of life through whom you sought to inspire your students.
I am eternally grateful that my son had a Mr Harty, for at least a year, and I am entirely certain that the year he spent under his eagle-eyed tuition will serve him well and in good stead for the rest of his life.
Dear Mr Harty, you were dear to all of us whose lives or whose children’s lives you touched and inspired, and you will be dearly missed by all of us and the entire St Edward’s College community.
Thank you and Godspeed Mr Harty.