Fr Ray Flaherty
Credit: Irish Mirror Personal Profile
Recognised around the world for his extensive cycling around the parish, with pictures of his travels reaching America and Australia, parish priest of Headford, Fr Ray Flaherty has made every effort to remain connected despite the unusual year everyone has faced.
“People are hugely important. The connection with people – I think that’s what keeps me going. And that they appreciate what you do as a priest and the significance of it,” he tells The Irish Catholic.
Fr Flaherty’s long relationship with the diocese remains a close one, testing the old adage that absence makes the heart grow fonder”
Made aware of the importance of deep connection very early in his life, Fr Flaherty recalled the impression his grandparents made on him – and his great-grandmother in particular.
“There’s a few people that have really influenced me. My grandparents and my great-grandmother was a very – she died when she was 88 and I was a little, young boy – but I do remember her very clearly. And she was a great woman, a deeply religious woman. This was my great-grandmother now. After she reared her family, she went to America and she worked in the presbytery for nine priests in Boston. It’s often a thing that I’d love to go back to visit someday, it’s just I’d say that presbytery mightn’t be there now, but just to see the area that she was.”
His proximity to her example instilled deep faith in him early on, with certainty regarding his vocation settling in him from as young as seven years of age:
“From a very young age, definitely from about 7 years of age, I’d have really thought about a vocation to priesthood. I can remember the late Fr Seán Kilbane, who just died earlier this year. Seán was an SMA priest who was based in my home parish for 13 and a half years and was a huge influence. He used to visit the schools, the national school where I went to school in Eagle’s Nest in Renvyle, and Seán would always say, ‘What would you like to be? What would you like to be when you’re older?’ Inevitably, I would always put up my hand and say, ‘I’d love to be a priest’,” he says, laughing as he remembers.
“Now that was the 70s. I don’t know if you’d get many people putting up their hand today, but it was a time that was more conducive to vocations at the most. I’m talking about the late 70s and into the early 80s. So it was always in my mind, and then I went to secondary school and then in my final year, when I was coming up to the Leaving Cert in 1990, I went to see the archbishop here in Tuam, Archbishop Joseph Cassidy was the bishop at the time, and he said, ‘Do your Leaving Cert. Get your Leaving Cert and then come back to me’. So I did that the following year and there was six of us entered for the Diocese of Tuam, which was quite a lot at that time in 1990, and four of us were ordained out of that six and four of us are working in the diocese today.”
You don’t have to scratch too far beneath the surface to find that people appreciate the outreach that you do in parishes”
Fr Flaherty’s long relationship with the diocese remains a close one, testing the old adage that absence makes the heart grow fonder. The relationships he has established and the care both himself and the parishioners put into their community has seen them through the trickiest of years, with Fr Flaherty saying that accompanying other people along the journey of life is the driver of his vocation.
“I do love being with the people and you get great satisfaction from baptising and weddings and being with people when they’re at funerals with their families. You know, you have a wonderful access to people at the joyful occasions and at the difficult occasions in their lives as a priest. You get invited to birthday parties and even to 21st birthday parties and things,” he laughs.
“You don’t have to scratch too far beneath the surface to find that people appreciate the outreach that you do in parishes. Especially during this lockdown now, we just produced a calendar in the parish here with all the photographs that we did during the lockdown and, you know it was really wonderful outreach to people.
“The amount of people that contacted me afterwards – I didn’t realise what I’d actually let myself in for in the sense of doing this. I didn’t realise the significance of it, really. You know, going to people, and some people have actually died since, and it’s amazing that you see the photographs that you took and you asked them at the time, ‘Can we put this up on our parish Facebook?’ Some people have passed on and it’s kind of, it’s a strange life, and it’s more difficult at the time of the Covid. But I think reaching out to people, it’s very, very important. One comment I did say was picked up by some local media here in the Tuam Herald, I said, ‘If the people cannot come to the church, you can go to them’.”
Acknowledging the greater difficulties people have faced during this second lockdown, with shorter days and harsher weather, Fr Flaherty remains optimistic that the opportunity to find God and each other is there to be grasped.
“I think for a while there, with all due respect, even ourselves as priests during the Celtic Tiger times, people were a little bit – I mean, it wasn’t one holiday, it was two and three. And it wasn’t just one car outside the door, it was two and three cars. And, you know, good luck to people, but at the same time, I think we lost a little bit of the run of ourselves and it took the likes of this to actually bring us down to the ground again and to realise, ‘Look it, at the end of the day, health, family, and the basic things in life are more important’.”