We present an extract from Never Know Your Place – Memoir of a Rulebreaker, the new book by Martin Naughton with Joanna Marsden.
Every young person is looking for freedom, but some have to fight harder than others …
In 1960s Ireland there was a special place for disabled children: behind the walls of an institution, cut off from the rest of society. At just nine years old, Martin Naughton was one of these children. Along with his younger sister Barbara he was sent to a Dublin institution, far away from his Irish-speaking home in Spiddal. But Martin wouldn't be sidelined. With the help of some unexpected characters – and an unlikely encounter with his Celtic football heroes – he began to change the way a generation of young disabled people saw themselves.
This is the story of a young man who not only won his own independence, but also led the fight for freedom for all disabled people.
Listening to the Lions
When you move to a new place, however resistant your heart and head may be at the beginning, there comes a point when you go from being an outsider to being an insider, and when the people around you – good and bad – become your people.
It’s hard to say when exactly this happened, but by the time I was twelve or thirteen, I had some good friends amongst the children of the hospital. There was Georgie Nibbs, of small stature but with something of a resemblance to his namesake, footballer George Best. Georgie’s family lived up the road in Donnycarney and he was a reliable wing man for any project I hatched. Another friend, John Doyle, had taken it upon himself to get my English vocabulary up to standard, using pirate radio as his main teaching resource.
In Spiddal, I had been the leader of my gang and by 1967 I had reprised that role in the hospital. I spent my idle minutes devising ways to add colour to our days. I might as well live for the moment. After all, I didn’t have much of a future to look forward to. My diagnosis was 'Duchenne’ muscular dystrophy, and a boy with Duchenne’s was destined for a short life. I’d seen other lads with the condition die after a cold or flu. The rest of us joked we were on death row. Every time one of us went, we all moved a step nearer to the front of the queue.
The imminence of death lent an urgency to everything, and that urgency was to have fun in spite of the White Tornado’s authoritarian regime. The best way to do this was to devise a convincing excuse to invite outsiders into the hospital, or better still, to get ourselves beyond the hospital walls for a few hours.
Kit and Dermot had started a hospital football team made up of deaf lads or those with minor physical disabilities, and since I fancied myself as an expert on the rules, I’d been given the job of umpire. When Celtic became the first British team to win the European Cup in April 1967, our collective enthusiasm for the game reached new heights. Dermot Mooney, who lived to put a smile on our faces, must have seen this and somehow he used his contacts in the Celtic Supporters’ Club to convince the entire European Cup team to visit the hospital.
It was St Patrick’s Day, Sunday, 17 March 1968.
‘God knows how he’s done it,’ Kit said to me that morning after Mass as he busied himself tidying up the yard.
Most of the staff were in, even those not scheduled to work, and it was all hands on deck to get the hospital looking its best.
Kit continued, ‘I mean, you know yourself, lads in the village would walk over fire to meet the Lisbon Lions.’
‘Do you really think the whole team will come?’ I asked. ‘When will they be here?’
The day before had been my fourteenth birthday and my mother and father had visited, so I was revved up already – and now this!
‘Don’t take it as gospel, Martin,’ Kit said, ‘but what I’ve heard is they will be going to meet de Valera in the Phoenix Park and might be squeezing us in beforehand. They’ve the game against Shamrock Rovers at Dalymount Park tomorrow, so it has to be today.’
Manager Jock Stein, Captain Billy McNeill and the Celtic team arrived in a coach an hour later, and the White Tornado herself rushed across the yard to the coach door to welcome them as they disembarked. After handshakes and a walk around the wards with the huge European Cup in arm, they gathered again in the hospital yard. Stein nodded to Billy McNeill and the team started to play football with us. It was electrifying. Like the huge spotlight that shone over those men had suddenly illuminated us in our hidden corner of Dublin.
McNeill stopped playing every now and again to offer tips.
‘Always pass the ball ahead of a player,’ he said, ‘so he can keep running, rather than to him.’
Jimmy Johnstone made us practise dropping the ball from the flat roof of the hospital building onto the concrete yard below, to learn how to control it.
‘Kill the ball dead when you receive it!’ he yelled.
I say ‘us’ because that is how I remember it. It felt like we were all involved, even though as a wheelchair user I couldn’t play. But I memorised every word that day, every piece of advice, and not long after I became the unofficial manager of the hospital’s football team. I was proud when the other kids nicknamed me Jock Stein after Celtic’s brilliant manager and strategist. The man who took a bunch of players from disadvantaged backgrounds and ‘bred’ success into them. Yes, Stein was the kind of man I wanted to be. A man who focused on the strength and victory of his team, rather than individual success.
The Celtic visit was more than just a wonderful day in our otherwise bleak lives. We might have been at the bottom of the heap in society, but the fact that these extraordinary men, who had the respect of the whole of Europe, knew who we are – well, that gave us hope. We hadn’t been forgotten. We were part of the world and things might happen.
The hospital football team became a chink of light in our lives. It turned out we had plenty of athletic young lads – like the Cruise brothers from North Dublin (if you had those boys on your team, you weren’t going to lose) or the affable Pat Crossan from Donegal (watch the windows!). Seeing them play better each week gave us something to root for, an outlet for the pent-up energy we had inside.
Never Know Your Place is published by The O’Brien Press
