Harbo "Niall" Harbison (2 Viewers)

ah yes

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tune though
 
please don't poke at the thin, possibly already porous veneer that my enjoyment rests on.
Groomed and banged a 15-year-old, but kinda nicely?

 
Groomed and banged a 15-year-old, but kinda nicely?


she remembers it fondly too, which is..... weird........ 🤷🏻‍♂️
 
Wow.


I did not know that.
Did he end up marrying or soMething, out of interest? (Different times yadDa yaddda)
Go on.....

It was in a recent biography of him. I remember the author being interviewed by the second captains lads and saying that he'd gone in to the book with Ali as his hero but then learned stuff that really made him reassess his attitude towards him.
 
Lads, lads, lets not pick sides, surely we can find time to cancel all of them?

Anyway, what are the chances that both nominees for the US presidential election in 2016, members of the British Royal family, the Saudi Crown Prince, half of Silicon Valley and a large section of the world of high fashion were all mates with Jeffery Epstein? Crazy world. We should never investigate this.
 
Well, I think it often just allows people to dismiss everything else about a person
This is it, and this is why I dislike the purity tests - especially for dead people, where it literally makes no difference at all, except in our imaginary version of the person

Best policy: no gods, no heroes
 
I've long since grown out of having heroes. Most of these charismatic, ego types have done highly questionable things in the past. I don't worship any of them. Makes for good books & documentaries though.
 

When Niall Harbison answers my FaceTime call on his iPad in Koh Samui, Thailand, the Tyrone man looks fit and healthy. He’s sitting in his apartment with Snoop, his dog he brought with him from Dublin, and to look at him you’d never guess just how far he’s come. Because, just over a year ago, his alcohol addiction put him in the intensive care unit of a Thai hospital for three days. The experience gave him a serious fright, he says, and the shock he needed to quit drinking for good.


On paper, Harbison has lived a life many people would envy. A well-known entrepreneur, in 2012, at the age of 32, he sold Simply Zesty, a web-design agency, before starting LovinDublin. It became the Lovin Media Group, which he exited at 38. He made a significant amount of money in the process — press reports put the figure at around €1m — and then upped sticks and moved to Thailand.


“The thing is, I never really liked being part of the media scene in Dublin,” Harbison says now. “I know that might be contrary to what people think about me, but I’m really happier behind my laptop doing my thing. I love my life now. I’m genuinely happy, and when I look back at what I was doing — being in that world of schmoozing and slightly fake niceness — I don’t really miss it.

“I was quite good at it, but it wasn’t really me. I never really enjoyed it that much and I was happy to leave it behind. I was thinking about it recently, about how I did marketing campaigns for products that I didn’t really have much interest in.”



"I used to go to Thailand every December for three weeks, specifically to avoid drink in Ireland, and then that turned into a month and then two months." Photo: Marek Slabej
"I used to go to Thailand every December for three weeks, specifically to avoid drink in Ireland, and then that turned into a month and then two months." Photo: Marek Slabej



Harbison looks back on some aspects of his Dublin life with fondness, particularly the people he worked with, and realises that he was lucky in terms of where his career took him. The move to Thailand came three years ago, when he realised that something had to change. He was drinking too much in Ireland and the routine he had fallen into was damaging him.

“I used to go to Thailand every December for three weeks, specifically to avoid drink in Ireland, and then that turned into a month and then two months. I used to go a bit mad in Ireland in the winter. December and January are cold and miserable, the days are short, the sky is grey and it didn’t help my outlook on life. Finally, I just took the plunge and moved here, mainly for lifestyle reasons. I really love Thailand and where I live in Koh Samui, the weather is beautiful, the scenery is gorgeous, and the food is amazing and really cheap.”

While many Irish people think of Thailand purely as a holiday destination filled with bars and nightclubs, Harbison says that the opposite is true of where he lives.

“There’s a big vegetarian and vegan scene and people are into healthy living. It’s the opposite of what you’d think. The wild side is there, of course, if you want to go looking for it, but living here and being on holiday are different.”

Harbison’s relationship with alcohol is complex. I bring up the topic tentatively, aware that it needs to be addressed, but not wishing to risk damaging someone’s recovery by exposing them to scrutiny. But Harbison has lived a lot of his life online, and towards the end of 2020, when things started to unravel, his 20,000-plus Twitter followers had front-row seats.
 
Ultimately, on December 30 of that year he found himself in hospital, connected to a drip and an ECG machine for 72 hours, suffering intensely. He spent three days in the intensive care unit and vowed he wouldn’t drink again.


“I don’t mind talking about it at all, because any time I do, it seems to help other people. I get messages sent to me saying, ‘thanks for being honest’. Also, I don’t have a job, and am more likely to make one than look for one, so I don’t really worry about what people might think of me from that point of view.


“The situation I ended up in was terrible. I always drank way too much and, to be honest, I was a functioning alcoholic. But when I moved to Thailand I thought I’d get away from all that, embrace clean living and all that, but actually things got worse.”


The problem was that in Koh Samui, there were no checks and balances. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that putting an alcoholic in a place where they had nothing to do and could afford to drink all day wasn’t a great plan. “I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have people looking out for me, so I just went off the deep end. I had a full meltdown and drank myself into a stupor. I had a partner when I first came out here, a fantastic girl, but that ended and I basically went for it.


“I’m used to having a job or a project to occupy me and when I didn’t have that, I didn’t have a purpose. So I would get up and go drinking all day. It was great fun for a month or two, but then the novelty wears off and you’re just miserable.”


The fact that Harbison was in significant pain was obvious. He suggests that alcohol is a symptom of a problem, rather than the problem. Without addressing the problem, it’s hard to make any progress with the drinking.


“I was hurting and I had never really dealt with it. I was getting drunk three times a day. I’d wake up with the shakes at 4am, get drunk and go back to sleep. Wake up at lunchtime and start again and then go for it again in the evening. My drinking accelerated from beer to wine to spirits, and it was normal to put away three bottles of wine a day before starting on the whiskey.


“Then one day I felt seriously bad and I thought I was dying. I rang a friend here and said, ‘Please help, I need to go to hospital’. In a funny way, I see it as a blessing now. I needed to get that bad, so bad that you couldn’t possibly justify it or explain it away, in order to start getting better.


“I had to get a big enough fright to make the decision that I just didn’t want to do this any more. Sitting in hospital, I literally thought I was going to die. I’d said I was going to quit a few times before but I’d never had that fright, that moment of realising this could be the end of everything. There’s nowhere else to go. So, in a weird way, I look on that experience as a positive one, and I’m actually delighted it finally happened. I’m not happy about the grief I caused for other people — for my mum and my family — but I’ll never drink again, so to me, that’s a success.”





"The dogs that live near the restaurants live on scraps and scavenging in bins, but the ones further up in the jungle, I don’t know what they eat." Photo: Marek Slabej
"The dogs that live near the restaurants live on scraps and scavenging in bins, but the ones further up in the jungle, I don’t know what they eat." Photo: Marek Slabej




Harbison’s experience with the Thai healthcare system was overwhelmingly positive. There is a lot of medical tourism in the region, and the result is that the general standard of healthcare is high. “I was in a bed 10 minutes after I arrived at the door of the hospital, which is pretty incredible. You do pay for it, it’s not free, but it was there for me when I needed it. I couldn’t speak more highly of the people who dealt with me.”


After being discharged, he started a course of therapy and cleaned up his life. “I quit booze and cigarettes. I’d been taking Valium to help me sleep, so I quit that as well. I just stopped. I won’t lie, the first month was horrific. I wasn’t functional and could barely remember my own name for the first week. My brain just wouldn’t work properly for a while.”


He had decided to take a year off work to focus on his recovery, but after a while he realised he needed a project, something to occupy him. Throughout his struggle with addiction, Snoop had been the one constant in his life. A rescue dog that Harbison adopted from the DSPCA in Dublin, Snoop had travelled to Thailand with Harbison and was instrumental in getting him out of bed for walks on the beaches and in the jungles of Koh Samui.


“When I see a dog, my whole body shoots with excitement. I’ll cross the road or park up my scooter just to say hello. Scroll through the pictures on my phone and every second one is a puppy. Snoop is like my shadow and I’m at my happiest with him on the beach. Dogs are my life.”


It was while walking Snoop that Harbison first became aware of just how many stray dogs there were in the area. “The island I’m on has around 60,000 people, but an educated guess at the number of stray dogs here is around 5,000. They’re everywhere. They live in the jungle, they live on street corners — it’s a very dog-centric place. People love dogs here and they’re generally pretty kind to them, as they are predominantly Buddhists and they don’t like killing animals, so they’re not rounded up and put down.


“But at the same time, they have a sort of belief that ‘what will be, will be’, so the dogs don’t get any medical care or anything like that. The ones that live near the restaurants live on scraps and scavenging in bins, but the ones further up in the jungle, I don’t know what they eat.”
 

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