THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW: PAT FALVEY:His drive and ambition have taken the mountaineer from Cork to the top of the world, but will Pat Falvey ever be more than just a rolling stone at home?
PAT FALVEY HAS a polar bear in his bedroom. “Would you like to see it?” the Cork adventurer says with a glint in his eye. As he is putting me up in his mountain lodge in Beaufort, Co Kerry, for the night while I find out about his latest expedition to the North Pole, it seems rude to refuse. He laughs at my mock hesitation. He knows well that “Come up and see my polar bear” sounds like an outdoors version of “Come up and see my etchings”.
A creamy white rug sprawls on the wooden boards of his bedroom floor, the remains of a magnificent polar bear, complete with head, tongue, teeth and claws. It was “taken out” by one of the last great Inuit hunters, a woman, in northern Canada a couple of years ago, he says. Falvey sorted out the legal papers and brought it home in a huge hockey bag. He likes to regale people with the story of how customs officers in Dublin reacted when he told them exactly what he had to declare.
Falvey has a lot of tales to tell. The biggest is of how he made millions in business and lost it all, only to reinvent himself as an adventurer. He is the only person in the world to have scaled its seven highest peaks twice, as part of the Seven Summits Challenge, including ascents of Everest from both Nepal and Tibet. He was the second Irishman to climb the world’s highest mountain, after the Belfast architect Dawson Stelfox. He has trekked to the South Pole, crossed South Georgia and, closer to home, been to the top of Carrauntoohil more than 2,000 times, sharing his love of mountains and nature with pretty much everybody who presents themselves at his centre. He took President Mary McAleese to the summit. She stayed in the lodge, and when he expressed concern that it might not be fancy enough for her she said: “Pat, it’s far from the Áras I was reared.”
Falvey is fluent in the language of extremes: highest, coldest, most dangerous. The words and phrases are chosen for maximum impact. It makes sense that when not risking life and limb in the name of adventure he earns his living as a motivational speaker. It’s not just the top of Everest, it’s the “top of the world”. Anywhere above about 8,000m is “the death zone”, a high-altitude realm that has claimed the lives of 13 of his mountaineering friends so far.
What might be called adventurabilia is everywhere, from the sea fossil he lugged down from “the top of the world” to the framed pictures of the hurl he used to enact the “highest poc fada in the world”. The accolades and awards include a medal from the king of Nepal. He picks up what used to be somebody’s shin bone, a gift from a cannibal tribe he once lived with in Papua New Guinea. He steers me to photographs of him crossing deserts, glaciers, jungles and polar regions, hanging out with tribespeople in remote places. “I started climbing because of my interest in other cultures. I am more of an amateur anthropologist than a climber,” he says.
The sittingroom walls are hung with pictures of his heroes: the polar adventurers Ernest Shackleton, Tom Crean and Ger McDonnell, a close friend mentored by Falvey, who died on K2 in 2008 as he tried to save the lives of two others. He would have been 40 this month. Falvey, also a film maker and producer, is making a documentary about his friend.
Sometimes he sits here looking at Shackleton and Crean and thinking, Can I really do what they have done? He has always been a dreamer. “I dream big,” he says. “But what drives me is following the dreams and never giving up. Achieving them is only a bonus. I encourage everyone to dream big. Everyone has their own private Everest.”
The hall in the lodge is littered with some of the 10,000 items he will take with him on what he is calling his last big adventure. There is everything from a geometry set and darning needles to compasses and calorific shortbread.
Last year he attempted the same challenge to walk to the North Pole, but one of his team got frostbite, and they had to turn back. This time it is just him and his partner in adventure, the Corkwoman Dr Clare O’Leary, who, on an expedition with Falvey in 2004, became the first Irishwoman to climb Everest. If they succeed they will be the first Irish team to reach the pole. They have been through intense training in the past year, using ropes to drag tyres behind them for hundreds of kilometres in preparation for the trek.
O’Leary is his polar opposite, he says. “You could say I’m a self-publicist. I’m arrogant. I have a lot to say for myself,” he explains. “Clare is quiet, doesn’t seek the limelight, only wants to talk about her adventures when she has completed them. In many ways she grounds me.”
The logistics are overwhelming. Nothing can be left to chance. After leaving this weekend to acclimatise and train for a few weeks in Iqaluit, in Canada, the pair will make the almost 800km journey pulling sledges containing all their provisions across shifting ice (made thinner by global warming) over 60 days. They will have no dogs or motorised vehicles. A team at the University of Limerick that has been monitoring them estimates that the trek will be as punishing on the body as running two marathons a day and that they will burn more than a million calories during the trip.
He and O’Leary have borrowed €100,000 each to offset the costs of the expedition. They are looking for a sponsor. “But it’s not like being a rugby player or an athlete,” he says of the difficulties of getting a company to back them. They have enough funds for one food drop halfway through the adventure.
“There are 100 different challenges facing us along the way, from polar bears to pressure ridges to navigational problems,” he says. “We don’t know what we will face.”
FALVEY GREW UP on a council estate on the northside of Cork city. When he was six he moved in with his grandmother. Apart from his parents, who lived nearby, she was one of the biggest influences on his life, instilling in him her work ethic and self-belief. “She beat it into me,” he says. “Really: those were the days when a grandmother could beat you.”
Falvey would help with her second-hand-clothing business, scrounging from people at affluent Cork addresses and selling the items on. He moved on to selling firewood and made enough to buy a lawnmower and start a grass-cutting business. He had left school to become a millionaire by the time his father’s building firm was failing. “I saw my mother crying after being attacked by one of my father’s creditors, and I swore to myself our family would never be poor again,” he says.
By 21 he had made his millions in the building trade. He was married, the father of two children and a ruthless workaholic. “I fired 200 people one year, and I never even thought about it.” He remembers inviting the entire management team of the Bank of Ireland to his home just to show off.
When he was 29 the business imploded after he took his eye off the ball and overtraded. He says the financial ruin led to depression. “I was suicidal,” he says. “My self-esteem plummeted.”
He took up hillwalking at the suggestion of a friend. On his second time out, during a walk up Carrauntoohil, he told his fellow climbers that he was going to climb Everest one day. “They told me afterwards they thought I was being a b*****ks,” he says.
Looking back, he sees that what he was doing was running away. “Initially, going up there, crossing the border from Cork to Kerry was a stress reliever, but it was also a way of running from my responsibilities. I was used to having everything. Now I had nothing. Climbing sharpened all my senses. Here I was in an arena that wasn’t costing a lot of money – I could live in a tent for six months of the year – but I was still succeeding,” he says.
His new adventures took him away from his family. After marriage counselling he realised that by distancing himself he was subjecting his wife to “emotional abuse”. His marriage broke up. He remains good friends with his wife and explains that despite the separation he will never divorce. “I got married for life,” he says.
“I would contend that I have always been a very selfish person. My wife always would have said it was only for that selfishness and single-mindedness that I’ve been able to do what I have done. I suppose I didn’t realise the damage I was causing until it was too late. My children, while I have a great relationship with them now, told me they resented me for missing important events in their lives. And, the thing is, I don’t agree with my wife. I think I could have had that balance and still done the things I wanted to do. I just didn’t realise what I was doing, the pain I was causing at the time.”
He says for a long time he felt as though he was living in a film. “I was the star of that film,” he says. Is that a kind of narcissism? He agrees that it is. “It all felt surreal. My life didn’t feel real, but they were real people, a real wife, real sons, real people who cared about me. It took me some time to realise that.”
He recites a couple of verses of The Men That Don't Fit Inby Robert Service, a poem that he says changed his life. The final shift happened a few years ago, when he realised that even with all of his achievements he had come to embody the final verse of the poem:
He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;
He has just done things by half.
Life’s been a jolly good joke on him,
And now is the time to laugh.
Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost;
He was never meant to win;
He’s a rolling stone, and it’s bred in the bone;
He’s a man who won’t fit in.
He decided he wouldn’t be a rolling stone any more. “I came back from the brink. I started to try to make amends to the people who loved me who I had hurt.” He says there have been people, mostly women, who have tried to change him over the years. His livelihood and his passion for adventure are not easy for some to accept. “But I am what I am what I am. You cannot change the spots on a leopard, and at 53 I am not going to change now,” he says. “I have mellowed, though; I like the Pat Falvey I am now. I’ve learned that you don’t have to be a b*****ks all your life.”
In the past few years he has spent more time with his siblings and parents, recognising that he had neglected that side of his life. His mother and father came to stay in the lodge for a night earlier this week. “Be careful,” his father says to him during a phone call to arrange the visit. “I will be careful, of course,” Falvey replies. “Love you.” After putting down the phone he explains that his parents light holy candles and put them in the window when he is away on expeditions and that he has the candle motif sewn on to his polar gear at their request. He says it’s useful to remember on the journey, when times are tough, that you have parents and children and family at home waiting for you to come back.
“I suppose, the way I lead my life, I don’t fear failure,” he says. “The last expedition was disappointing, of course, but there was somebody’s life at risk. When I came home I thought of one of Shackleton’s letters where he says it’s better to be a live donkey than a dead lion. We came back like donkeys and are going back out again as lions, and I am a wiser adventurer now”.
His achievements are impressive, his spirit indomitable and his ability to speak about himself in the third person without irony something to behold. “Pat Falvey is not interested in being first,” he might say, or, “You can’t change the spots on Pat Falvey,” or, endearingly and often, “that a***hole Falvey”.
He was hurt when, after planting a tricolour on top of Everest on his first ascent, at the age of 34, the patriotic move was seen as detracting from the achievement of Stelfox, who claimed the climb for Ireland and Britain but planted only the team sponsor’s flag. “I am a republican. It was important to me to plant the Irish flag. I never claimed to be the first Irish person; I always said it was Dawson who was first. I was called a bigot at the time for expressing my pride in being Irish, and it did hurt,” he says. He can, however, rightly claim to be the first Corkman on Everest and, more importantly, the first Norrie, or northsider of that city, to make the ascent.
From the beginning he and his fellow climbers in Co Kerry were mavericks in a mountaineering world that they viewed as elitist. He mentions the Service poem again, saying he has moved away from being the man in the last verse.
“I am the person who fits in now. I’ve made more of an effort with my family and my friends. I am calmer and more generous with my time. Before, everything used to be a problem, and now nothing is a problem.”
He talks about “taking out” the North Pole on this, his 68th expedition as though it were a polar bear and he a brave Inuit hunter. It represents the final leg of what he calls the Three Poles Challenge – Everest, the South Pole and the North Pole – following in the footsteps of his explorer heroes.
Essentially, Falvey and O’Leary will be living in a freezer for the duration of the trek. His main fear is that his back will go – he damaged a sciatic nerve in the South Pole – but he has spent several hundred hours in the gym building up his strength so he can complete the challenge. “Every hour will be like an Everest, and we are going to tackle it the way you would any major objective. The way you would eat an elephant, bite by bite. We will do it one step at a time. The simple fact that we will keep in our heads all the time is that we want to stand on the North Pole. That’s the goal. All we can do is go for it.”
Pat Falvey: My Private Everestbegins on February 6th on Setanta Sports. You can follow his progress at patfalvey.com
Curriculum vitae
Age53
BornCork
LivesBeaufort, Co Kerry
EducationLeft school at 15 to become a millionaire
AchievementsTwice climbed the world's highest peaks in the Seven Summit Challenge. Walked to the South Pole and across South Georgia
PhilosophyLife is like a mountain, and we all have mountains to climb
