Dalesfolk: Michael Stewart

Most of us read of it with horror and forget because, we think, 'It couldn't happen to me...'

Well it could.

It happens to ordinary people almost every day, out of the blue. And those victims, if they survive and if they are lucky, turn to an Irishman with a Scottish name who has lived in the Dales some 30 years.

Michael Stewart nearly became a priest. He spent most of the first 21 of his 49 years in monasteries in his native Dublin and, priest-like, now devotes most of his waking hours helping people in deep trauma.

But, quite un-priest-like, he helped to build a small but unique business which is now accepted as world-leader in the new and profoundly difficult art of helping victims to overcome the psychological aftermath of ordeals sometimes so horrific that I dare not describe them here.

Michael, who lives near Burnsall, is the joint founder of the Centre for Crisis Psychology, based in one of the converted outbuildings at Broughton Hall.

His 20-operative team is on 24 hours notice, 365 days a year, to fly off counsellors to tragedies all round the world.

Their "clients" are the survivors of incidents ranging from bank clerks held up at gun point (sometimes as many as 21 in a single month) to multiple death crashes in aeroplanes, trains or coaches: a centre counsellor was on the scene of the recent Selby train crash within a couple of hours.

Think of a disaster in the past decade or so and Michael has been called in to give mental succour: the Herald of Free Enterprise ferry sinking at Zeebrugge; the Piper Alpha oil-rig explosion in the North Sea; the recent coach crash in South Africa which killed 28 British tourists, mainly pensioners; the Hillsborough soccer tragedy in Sheffield.

And, in fact, it was a soccer disaster that put Michael Stewart on the path towards becoming one of the world's best-known trauma counsellors.

But back to the beginning. At the age of 21, in his Irish monastery, Michael decided that the priesthood wasn't for him.

He jumped on a plane to London and, like generations of Irishmen before him, became a building site labourer, carrying hods of bricks until he could no longer take the physical punishment.

"Until then, I had lived a very sheltered life in very supportive communities," he recalls now with no small trace of sadness in his voice. "It was in London at that time that I discovered that the world could be a very lonely and hostile place."

He drifted from job to job until he found something that he enjoyed. He trained as a psychiatric nurse and got a post at the now largely defunct Scalebor Park Hospital in Burley-in-Wharfedale and moved to the Dales, at first in Pateley Bridge. This is where fate took a hand.

The Bradford football fire still haunts many people: 56 dead and hundreds horribly burned. Michael Stewart was one of the people called in to help the survivors and he was to work with them for three years.

"I learned some really terrible things in those years," he says. "Some of my patients were pensioners who had been soldiers in World War Two. When I began counselling them, what they really wanted to talk about was the terrible things they had seen and done during the war.

"They always thanked me for letting them get that off their chests which I found touching because, after all, we were talking of experiences 30 or 40 years old. I asked them why they had never spoken of it before and they simply said: 'No-one ever asked me'."

In his work with the Bradford victims, Michael began to build a reputation which soon spread nationwide: he was called in at Hillsborough, Zeebrugge, Piper Alpha but he was still officially employed at the Burley hospital.

The blue eyes glitter, the serious face creases with a smile: "This was Maggie Thatcher's time and small hospitals were being decimated by NHS cuts. My bosses were getting a little impatient of my being called out all over Europe because I obviously could not do my work at Burley. It was time to go."

Michael and his partner, forensic psychologist Peter Hodgkinson, set up the Centre for Crisis Psychology in 1987, the first "private enterprise" counselling service in Britain and one of the first in the world.

Their operations now span the world, with blue-chip clients like airlines, banks, oil companies and retail giants.

Michael flies the Atlantic like a yo-yo, makes regular TV appearances and lectures to university audiences. He is on the move so much that he does not even keep an office at the Broughton HQ - "That would be a waste of space because I'm never there."

At present, he is particularly concerned about the fate of farmers during the foot and mouth epidemic and praises organisations like The Samaritans, who have taken out large newspaper advertisements to offer their services.

Says Michael: "Obviously, living where I do I know a lot of farmers and my heart goes out to them. They are very proud people but it is often pride that makes them reluctant to seek help and advice.

"There are many people they can speak to: the family doctor, their priest, perhaps some business adviser but, perhaps best of all, their friends and family. As the ads say, it is good to talk.

"One thing I can assure farmers of is that this particularly incident it is transitory. Although they probably won't believe it now, and it won't do much to ease their present pain, it will pass. The thing to concentrate on is that, however bad things get, they will one day get better again."

Although he will hate my saying it, Mike Stewart would have made a great priest. He may work with medical science but he is the sort of guy to inspire faith. I hope farming readers will take comfort.