Paul Fennessy

FOUR YEARS AGO, Kevin Doyle’s life changed irrevocably.

28 May 2022 is a day he will never forget.

Doyle was sailing in Dublin Bay at the Irish Masters National Championships in a single-handed Olympic class boat.

A former GAA intercounty player who, despite being in his 50s, was still a keen athlete. Golf and rowing were among the other sports he had a talent for. In sailing, he was by no means an elite performer, but he had ambitions to be the best in Ireland with four years of practice behind him.

That fateful day, however, Doyle got a smack on the back of the neck from the boom – a big bar that swings over and back, holding the sail upright.

As a result, Doyle suffered a broken neck.

“I was very fortunate that I managed to get pulled out because when your arms and legs aren’t working, everything stops,” Doyle tells The 42. “Life jackets, we don’t wear them. We wear buoyancy aids, which keep you buoyant, but it doesn’t keep you face up. 

“So literally, I was faced down in the water, no arms or legs to throw me up.”

Doyle was conscious but stunned, wondering what was going on.

It had all happened so quickly, and everything from the neck down had stopped working.

Maintaining a degree of composure was a challenge. The surrounding swells exacerbated the situation, particularly with his arms not functioning.

The rescue operation from the water took roughly 15 to 20 minutes.

After an initial failed attempt, the National Safety Lead for Irish Sailing, whom Doyle knew personally, was key to a successful intervention.

Following the rescue, Doyle was brought to St Vincent’s Hospital. After five days, he was sent home, still able to walk, and told to return in six weeks. A scan revealed his spinal cord was too inflamed to work on. He was instructed to wear a collar and take it off at night. 

Four nights later, he was lying in bed, sneezed, heard a click, and his right hand stopped functioning.

He messaged his best friend and next-of-kin in Prague.

“I’ve just lost my right arm. If I turn in my sleep the wrong way, this could get worse,” he recalls.

“I said, if you don’t hear from me by 11 tomorrow, assume something’s gone wrong, and someone get the guards, or kick the door in. I got up the next day, and I rang him, and I just said: ‘This is not great.’” 

On his friend’s advice, Doyle called the hospital. They offered to send an ambulance to his home in Ashbourne, Meath, but he insisted on ordering a taxi.

While sitting in the waiting room, more problems arose. It was a similar sensation to the day of his accident. His legs and arms began to feel “rubbery”. A staff member arrived to take him to another room.

“As we’re walking, I was saying: ‘You might need to help me here. Things aren’t going great.’ He said: ‘You’ll be fine.’ And as I was going through A&E, I went down. I was admitted straight away.”

That night, Doyle was sent to a unit in the Mater hospital that specialises in spinal emergencies.

An operation was required. It was a complex job. He had a tight neck, and it required “pulling things left and right” in the throat. The surgeon outlined the range of possible complications ahead of the procedure.

“He said: ‘We can give you a stroke. We can paralyse you. We can actually nick an artery, and we won’t be able to stop the blood.’ He said: ‘It’s quite serious going and doing what we’re doing, and there are a lot of challenges around that.’ I said: ‘So what’s the outcome?’ He said: ‘You could be left from your neck down, paralysed.’”

“And I said: ‘So why are we doing the operation?’ He said: ‘Because without it, you are going to be paralysed.’ It took about 30 seconds. I just went: ‘It’s going to be grand, if that’s the baseline, that’s what we live with.’ So they prepared me for the worst.

“He said I wouldn’t be breathing on my own, I wouldn’t be eating on my own, I wouldn’t be doing loads of things ever again on my own, and I remember saying to him: ‘You must be a good surgeon.’ He asked: ‘Why?’ I said: ‘Because you’re a shite salesman.’ And he laughed. He said: ‘No, I believe in telling people the truth of the way things are.’”

The Carlow man messaged a friend, saying he wanted to be cremated, for his ashes to be scattered in Dublin Bay, and provided further instructions in case he died.

“How do you tell people you’re screwed? And I don’t believe in unnecessarily bringing negativity into people’s lives.”

After the procedure, Doyle was moved back to St Vincent’s. 

“It was a tricky enough time, to be honest, because they weren’t moving quickly enough. I wanted to go home.

“I’m [now] a complete tetraplegic. So, my right arm works, and my head. Everything else in some way, shape or form [does not]. My legs are screwed. They’re spastic, so they flap all over the place, and my left arm does as well.

“I was in Vincent’s for seven months, and it was a challenge in there.”

Doyle has a titanium plate, and his head doesn’t turn properly.

“And I remember, they do the usual thing, name, date of birth, make sure to have the right person. And then they said ‘address’, and it just clicked with me. I actually was homeless. I couldn’t go anywhere.

“I’m now in this [machine]. Where I was before, I had to put the steel stairs on. I wasn’t going back there. Nobody would take me. Nobody wants a guy in a wheelchair as a tenant – I can tell you that now.”  

Through a friend, Doyle sourced a wheelchair-accessible Airbnb, so the situation was eventually resolved.

He had to quit his job in information and cloud technology as a result of the accident and was forced to live on an invalidity pension. Yet he was determined to find a challenge he could conceivably navigate, a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

“I went back sailing 48 weeks after I broke my neck and came third in my first race, and then realised it was too dangerous,” he said.

In March 2025, St Patrick’s Day weekend, Doyle decided he wanted a new pastime.

“I typed in ‘parachuting’ and up came ‘Target Shooting Ireland’.

“I was actually looking at something like jumping out of an aeroplane. Why not? I mean, how bad can it get? It can get worse, by the way, but how bad can it get?

“So I contacted them. They put me in contact with a coach out in Meath at the National Airgun Training Centre.”

He tried both pistol and rifle shooting, preferring the latter, driving there in his adapted car.

“I don’t like to drive it too much because it’s quite complex. You’ve got a throttle and brake in one hand and a steering ball that steers the thing. But then you’ve got indicators [too]. You can’t take your hands off anything. When you’re driving with your feet, everything is brakes and throttle. So you can turn the radio on. You can’t do that with the car from my position.”

After an enjoyable day there, Doyle received a phone call from one of the coaches, inviting him back.

His scores, it turned out, were abnormally high for a beginner.

The following weekend, he took part and ultimately won a competition, eclipsing all participants, including those who were able-bodied.

It proved his opening session was no fluke. He was told it would take most people “five to 10 years” or 10,000 hours to reach this level.

“I have the mind [for sport],” he says. “I don’t look at medals as winning and losing. I look at the process: ‘I’ve nailed that part of the process.’” 

The possibility of qualifying for the Paralympics was put to him. Doyle had nothing else going on, so he accepted the challenge.

“A month later, we’re having the same discussion, and they’re saying: ‘It’s not going to take 10,000 hours of anything.’ [The coach] says: ‘The progress you’re making here is way above what we expect.”

His first task was getting certified by the International Paralympic Committee.

“What they’re trying to do is create a standard, making sure that everybody is at a common level, for example, so you don’t have able-bodied athletes competing against people with physical challenges of some sort.”

Doyle was required to travel to Serbia for the assessment.

This trip, and journeys abroad in general, pose further challenges. Lufthansa is Doyle’s preferred partner; many airlines do not allow rifles and guns.

The plan was to fly from Dublin to Munich, plus a connecting flight to Belgrade, and a 90-minute trip to his destination.

“We got to Munich, they couldn’t put my wheelchair on the second aeroplane, so we had to be rerouted. 

“They took me out of the plane, and they gave me a set of earmuffs.  

“Everyone was loaded. The engines were running, and they had me on the ground. I don’t have a lot of German, and I’m trying to explain to the guys that they need to flip the whole seat up, plug the cables together, then hit this switch [on the wheelchair].

“I’m trying to give them the donkey’s explanation on how to [operate it], and eventually I just said tell the pilot to go because we’re taking too long, and it would take far too long. So what they did was to put us on a bigger plane. We went from Munich to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Belgrade. But instead of getting in at four o’clock in the afternoon, we got in at two o’clock in the morning. Then you get to the hotel.

“Can’t get into the bathroom or bedroom. The door is not wide enough. I sleep on the couch, and then I disassemble the wheelchair so I can take off one arm, one leg and squeeze in. But still, you can’t use the full bathroom. So this is the type of thing you’re up against when travelling to these locations.”

Paralympic shooters often have military backgrounds, but Doyle is an exception in this regard, too.

“They’ve had military people before me, years ago, back in 2010, 2012, so it’s that long since there was someone representing Ireland.

“It’s quite a complicated thing to be at the level of disability I’m at, and to go and travel. You’ll end up stuck in places where your wheelchair doesn’t arrive. It’s more than an inconvenience if your bags don’t arrive. This [wheelchair] is my legs, and more than my legs, it’s my support. If it doesn’t arrive, what happens?”

In his short time competing in the sport, Doyle has already experienced significant success.

Last October, he won a silver medal in a competition with top shooters from Britain and Ireland.

He was selected to represent Ireland at the 2026 WSPS World Cup in Novi Sad, Serbia, less than one year after taking up the sport.

The 58-year-old is now targeting one of the 36 places available for the 2028 Paralympics in Los Angeles.

Doyle’s numbers over the past year, he says, would be good enough for a 23rd-place finish, while he believes a podium position is “not out of the question” in LA, or at the 2032 event in Brisbane, even though most of his rivals are considerably younger and more experienced.

Certain competitions have quota places. Doyle needs a top-three finish to acquire points to help him towards qualification. This September, for instance, he is planning on competing at the World Championships in Changwon, Korea, but even getting that far requires a minimum qualifying score.

“I’m rifle 10 metre at the moment, our bullseye is half a millimetre in size. It’s the size of a ballpoint on the top of your pen. Within that, there are 10 concentric circles. I have to hit 10.5 or above on every shot for 60 shots to qualify for the final. Then in the final, they’re slightly different, but you still have to be hitting 10.5 and above to get a medal position.”

Doyle has a 40-hour training week, Monday to Friday. He does six-and-a-half to seven hours most weekdays and three hours at weekends.

“I do three technical sessions a day, two sports psychology sessions and three physical training sessions.”

For range days, Trinity College have accommodated him, despite not being an alumnus. It can be a 20-minute trip from his home in Leopardstown, as opposed to the multiple hours it can take to get to the National Airgun Centre.

“The engineering department there is working on my wheelchair at the moment to make a proper stand for it.”

He continues: “I played intercounty hurling [for Carlow] as a young fella, it was all screaming for blood, and lads charging around the pitch, and physicality.

“With this sport, I spend more time trying to be calm. You don’t want adrenaline running through your body because that creates tremors, and that’s moving from a bullseye out. You’re gone from a 10.5 out to a nine-point something; you’re going home if you hit nines.

“I believe that it’s actually my system that gives me the upper hand in competition, because you can train physical, but the mental side of things is where I think it’s slightly different – similar to me in 30 seconds, realising that I was only able to blink going forward, if the operation went wrong, I have the mind that goes: what’s the end? And then I go, okay, so what are the steps to complete the end? And then I go, yes or no. So it’s the same in shooting; I block everything out. There’s no panic. I don’t do panic.

“There is no ego. It’s an execution. Even when I was writing code, there was no excitement in code – but there was a delight. The accomplishment of reducing and improving.

“I think one of the things that leans to my strengths is: I’m a problem solver. So I found a solution to not drowning that day in Dublin Bay. I found a solution in the hospital when [the surgeon] was telling me how things were. I found a solution when I was homeless, on how to get through it. So shooting is no different. If there’s too much movement in the foresight, it’s a problem. How do I solve it?

“I approach it with my sports psychology head. It’s all about repeatability, it’s all about reliability, and I remove emotion.”

Doyle is up against it, though, competing against athletes from better-resourced countries with significant investment behind them and intense competition for places on the team.

Often, the athlete from Drumphea is in such a state of heightened concentration while shooting that he has to be told that he has finished.

Finances are another big obstacle. Doyle estimates he requires a budget of around €90,000 a year to cover the costs of travelling, accommodation, equipment and other necessities.

There is an option to offer support via his website, but Doyle says he does not want people to donate purely out of sympathy.

“I’m a believer that you don’t get investment unless it’s [merited],” he says.

“So the real way I look at this – if I could see someone who could see me as investable rather than charitable, because I don’t want to fall into charity.

“I’m lucky in lots of ways to be a full-time athlete.

“I devote all my time to this. That’s not something everyone can do when there are no paid positions.

“It’s not like you have in the UK; they’ve got an administrative team, and those people are paid substantial money, and they have metrics to back that up.

“My predecessor, Philip Eaglesham [who represented Ireland], had a support structure from the military in the UK, it’s veteran support. They funded everything for him.”

Some friends of Doyle got together and raised money merely to get him started in the sport, but he is exploring alternative avenues for a more regular stream of funding.

Doyle’s invalidity pension is €259.50 a week, while he also has a medical card to access certain services free of charge.

“That’s my whole income,” he explains. “And what I do is I put back in everything I can to make sure my shooting doesn’t [suffer].

“If you’re aiming up there, you have to be thinking up there, training up there, working to get up there. And then the reality is down here. So it’s not easy.

“I’ve sold everything I possess to continue in the sport, because I’m a believer too.

“I often think of myself standing in front of the Dragons. You know Dragons’ Den, the one in the UK?

“And they’ll go: ‘So how much have you put into the business yourself?’ If I told them I had sold everything, [they would be impressed]. I had sailing gear. I had old computers.

“But when you end up in this situation, I liquidated everything to survive first. Then I liquidated a second round so that I could actually go shooting.

“So there are days when my grocery bill, half or a third of the costs, is the delivery coming from Dunnes Stores. That’s how little I have. There’s no money, and I’m very grateful I live in a country where I actually have an invalidity pension.

“I’m lucky enough to have accommodation where I have it now, even though that’s only a recent thing. Since I got out of the hospital, I’ve been fighting for wheelchair-accessible property.

“[In the immediate future] I’m looking for 10 grand. I’m knocking on doors everywhere I can on that one, because if I don’t get that, I don’t get to the World Championships.” 

Athletes can receive up to €40,000 a year from Sport Ireland, but individuals who receive that amount – Rhasidat Adeleke, Rhys McClenaghan, and Katie-George Dunlevy are a few examples – unlike Doyle, have a significant track record competing at Olympic or Paralympic level. Achievement rather than potential tends to be rewarded.

It is an uphill task, but Doyle is well aware that the consequence of his accident could easily have been much worse.

“I had a ward sister come to me in Vincent’s, 4 December 2022. And she said: ‘We’re moving you to a nursing home.’

“And I said: ‘No, you’re not.’

“Being in a nursing home on the other side would shut me down to where I’d have to look forward to jelly for dessert on a Sunday.”

Simply dealing with people can be a challenge, too. They are often well-meaning but unsure of how to act or what to say around Doyle.

“I do create discomfort,” he says. “I won’t lie. People don’t like being around me.”

He is grateful to his partner and a couple of close friends from the sailing fraternity who have provided continual assistance since the accident. Overall, despite having suffered substantial misfortune, he retains a positive outlook.

“I’m as lucky as hell. I’m able to use my right arm, and my head works perfectly. I am now able to eat properly. I was on tubes forever. I taught myself, my stomach, how to eat. I came off a ventilator because it wouldn’t work. I wouldn’t let it work. I had no time for it.

“Yeah, my bladder is screwed. My life expectancy has come back 10-15 years, I would say, because wheelchairs are not good for you.

“I’m living the bloody life, though. It’s as good as it was before, with certain challenges. If anyone was meant to be in this situation, maybe I am, because of the way I think.

“This is not final. This is just a bus stop on the way to the destination. We stop off now and again. We meet different people, we do different things, and we get back on the bus, and we go on until we realise, actually, that last stop was your last stop.

“You know what? If that happens, I wouldn’t give a second back. I wouldn’t change a thing for what’s happened on the way to here. If you change one thing, you change everything. So I control it, and I don’t worry about tomorrow. I really don’t. A little bit like the shot. I’m in the shot now.”

You can learn more about Kevin Doyle and options for support via his official website here and you can view his YouTube channel here. You can visit Target Shooting Ireland’s website here.