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- Herausgeber: The O'Brien Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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 boy who not only won his own independence, but also led the fight for freedom for all disabled people. 'Martin was a formidable and tireless campaigner for the right of people with disabilities to live in their own communities and homes.' President Michael D. Higgins 'Martin Naughton was a protector, a leader, a gamechanger. In reading this narration of his life, tears filled my eyes.' Dr Rosaleen McDonagh, playwright, rights activist and author of Unsettled.
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‘I still remember that day in March 1968 when our Lisbon Lions team visited Martin Naughton and the other children in the institution in Baldoyle. The impression we got was that these kids had been forgotten, abandoned by society. It left a mark on us all and I often thought about them when I looked at my own children.’
John Fallon, Glasgow Celtic European Cup-winning team of 1967
‘Martin was a formidable and tireless campaigner for the right of people with disabilities to live in their own communities and homes.’
President Michael D Higgins
2“Martin Naughton was a protector, a leader, a gamechanger. In reading this narration of his life, tears filled my eyes.’
Dr Rosaleen McDonagh, playwright, rights activist, author of Unsettled
‘Martin Naughton was a leader not only in Ireland, but in Europe and the United States. His personal experiences with his disability enabled him to understand not only the plight of disabled people but also how critical it was to encourage people to have a vision for what their life could be.’
Judy Heumann, US activist, author ofBeing Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist
3‘I had the privilege of standing with Martin Naughton on a number of campaigns and projects. He was an inspiring activist, a courageous and mighty warrior.’
Christy Moore, singer and songwriter
‘I was waiting in the lobby of the Royal Dublin Hotel when the door was pushed open for a man in a wheelchair, wearing a fishing hat, with a cigarette sticking out of his mouth. He brought me into the CIL office on Bolton Street, where I was astonished to encounter a group of militant wheelchair-users passionately committed to changing the world. This was in sharp contrast to the perception of disability I had been brought up with – people who were passive, dependent and objects of pity and charity.’
Christian O’Reilly, writer of Sanctuary, Inside I’m Dancing and No Magic Pill (a stage play inspired by the life of Martin Naughton)
4‘If the Independent Living movement was a mafia, Martin would have been our Don; he was always trying to think of new and seemingly radical ways of equalising the playing field …. Now that he has passed from this world, we have to ensure that his legacy lives on.’
Sarah Fitzgerald, activist and writer of Conversations About Activism and Change
‘Never Know Your Place brilliantly recounts disabled people’s resistance to segregation. Martin’s life and activism will resonate deeply with so many – from survivors of mother and baby homes to those still living in direct provision – charting the path from institutionalisation to freedom.’
Eilionóir Flynn, Director, Centre for Disability Law and Policy, University of Galway
5‘Martin was a gentleman. We connected on the level that those with indigenous drive do. I was involved in the founding of the Center for Independent Living and met great people on that road. We are all institutionalised one way or another, and it is our duty to listen to those who broke through with truth and energy to reveal our right to freedom as human beings. Martin’s voice speaks for the human soul.’
Liam Ó Maonlaí, musician
‘A compelling story of a man who was determined to have his say in the world, and also a reminder that activism is not just about big campaigns, it’s about the small everyday ways we change the world around us for the better.’
James Cawley, disabled activist
9
Dedication
To my loving family, who always encouraged me to think big.
To the people who inspired me and kept me going through the tough years in Baldoyle Hospital, and the friends who later supported me and took joy in my independence.
To all my PAs, without whom it would have been impossible to live such a rich and free life.
To the other disabled people who fought for change alongside me, many of whom are no longer with us.
Tá buíochas mór ag dul do mo thuismitheoirí agus do mo mhuintir as ucht na tacaíochta, na comhairle agus an spreagtha a thug siad dom chun mo dhícheall a dhéanamh i gcónaí.
Buíochas mór dóibh siúd ar fad a thug cúnamh dom ar bhealach amháin nó ar bhealach eile, go mórmhór m’fhoireann tacaíochta, chun ceann scríbe a bhaint amach.
Dóibh siúd, cosúil liom féin, a sheas liom agus a thug a gcroíthe agus a n-anamacha le saol níos fearr a bhaint amach.
Go raibh maith agaibh!
Martin Naughton
Contents
My Time with Martin
Joanna Marsden
Martin Naughton had a way of letting everyone know he was in a room. A dramatic hat (in his older years a flat skullcap, in earlier decades a tweed cap or a fedora), wispy long hair and a goatee. Before I knew him, I’d seen him once or twice at events and noticed a bit of fuss as he arrived, his visible impatience when he disagreed with what someone was saying, and how as he made his way around the room with his Personal Assistant alongside, he would give a firm nod to anyone he knew or was interested in knowing.
I didn’t know the younger Martin whose story is told in this memoir. The first time I met Martin properly was in 2010 when I interviewed him for a book on how life had changed for disabled people in Ireland.
‘Glad something is being written,’ he said. ‘The histories of marginalised people are too often forgotten.’
His final comment in that first interview was pointed: ‘The credit for what has been achieved so far belongs to no organisation, it belongs to disabled people themselves.’
A few years later, I got an email from him saying he needed to talk to me about a piece of work.14
‘I’ll meet you on your turf,’ he said.
Later that week, at the Marine Hotel in Dún Laoghaire, he explained he wanted to leave a written account of his life and of the political battle to free disabled people from institutions and get funding for Personal Assistant (PA) services. He was sixty and with a progressive disability like his he said, ‘It should have been lights out long ago.’
He didn’t know how much longer his luck would last.
The memoir was first and foremost about setting the record straight, making sure the events he’d lived through were not forgotten.
‘If people forget, it’s easier to go backwards,’ he said, alluding to the fact that budgets for PA hours were always under threat. ‘Even if this just ends up a pile of paper and photos in a corner of the Centre for Disability Law and Policy in Galway, it’s worth writing.’
I understood. ‘You know if you put the word “disability” into the National Library’s digital photographic archive, you get one photo of a woman with an orthopaedic shoe,’ I told him, this being something I had discovered the week before.
He raised his eyebrows. ‘When we’re done with this, let’s put that right.’
Over the subsequent two years, Martin and I met every couple of months at his terraced cottage in Baldoyle village to work on the book.
Early on, when he spoke about his childhood and first years in Baldoyle Hospital, his memories came forcefully, as if locked in his heart for too long.
‘I had a rough night after that last session,’ he admitted one morning.
But as he grew older in the narrative, what I came to think of as the ‘political’ Martin emerged. He could talk forever about the steps in his journey to independence and the development of his political thinking, but 15he found it hard to talk directly about his emotional life.
‘I want to be open. I want to tell you everything we need to write this,’ he told me, ‘but I’m used to keeping my cards close to my chest.’
Seeing him sometimes visibly frustrated as he tried to find the words made me wonder about the consequences of being torn away at the age of nine from his native language and having to learn English in a medical institution. I also thought about how hard it must have been for Martin to protect his privacy in that institution and even after he moved to his own home because of his requirement for twenty-four-hour PA support.
Co-writing a story is a strange process, because you find yourself needing to read between the lines in the conversations that take place. If you come from a different background, as I do as a non-disabled female writer who grew up over two decades later, this isn’t always easy. I remember questioning, for example, why Martin wanted to talk so much about the character of ‘JC’, the quintessential Haughey-era businessman who gave him his first job outside the hospital. It took a conversation with Rosaleen McDonagh to remind me that not only was it incredibly rare for a man with a disability like Martin’s to get a job in the private sector, but such a job was also symbolic of a type of patriarchal power that would have felt unattainable to a disabled boy growing up in 1960s Ireland.
I often heard Martin referred to as ‘the father of the Irish Independent Living movement’ and, in the best of ways, I think this was true. It’s also notable that many of the men in Martin’s early life followed a pattern: they were traditional providers, and yet they were also nurturing characters, who looked out for the young people around them and deferred to the women in their households.
Perhaps because of my own perspective, I was drawn straightaway to the 16women in Martin’s early life, such as his mother Nora and his older sister Maureen. They seemed unpredictable and formidable characters. Sometimes, as with the senior nun he called the ‘White Tornado’, they were the rulemakers. But their lives felt curtailed. They were surviving in a society with few options, and I was struck by the empathy Martin had for that.
When Martin died in October 2016, this book was a draft. I eventually completed it by drawing on notes and recordings, and by talking to Martin’s sister Barbara and his close friends. A list of those who contributed can be found in the Acknowledgements, but particular thanks is owed to Niall Ó Baoill, Rosaleen McDonagh, Hubert McCormack (RIP), Kathleen Reynolds, Mary Llewellyn, and Gordana Rajkov (RIP), each of whom shared memories and anecdotes, and to Allen Dunne (DFI), Selina Bonnie (ILMI), Michael Doyle (IWA) and Michael Dawson, who helped bring the project to completion.
At its heart this is a memoir of boyhood and the making of the political animal that was Martin Naughton. The book ends in 1995 with the political campaign for PA funding that Martin considered his greatest achievement. If you are curious about the final two decades of Martin’s life, in which there were significant achievements, you will find some information in Niall Ó Baoill’s Afterword.
Today we take it for granted that disabled people are a visible part of our communities. We think nothing when we pass a wheelchair user in the street, and we don’t notice if that wheelchair user has a PA beside them. But this book may remind you that there was a time, not that long ago, when things were different. If you were around in that time, you may find yourself asking, why did I not notice that disabled people were not there?
Martin would have been happy to think of you reading his story. It was 17not an easy story for him to tell, but he went to great lengths to tell it because he feared that in history, as in politics, ‘If it’s not in writing, it never happened.’ It is in this spirit that half the royalties of the book will go into a fund in Martin’s name, which will begin by devising three small bursaries with the Irish Writers Centre to encourage other disabled people to tell their stories.
Foreword
Dr Rosaleen McDonagh
Martin Naughton was a constant figure in my life. Almost a surrogate father. In reading this narration of his life, tears filled my eyes. The memories are not just wrapped up in a sense of nostalgia, they hold a picture of a man who was a protector, a leader, a gamechanger. The book is also personal to me in that many of Martin’s peers within the disability movement, who organised so much disabled activism, have now also passed. It would be naïve to suggest that Martin and his peers only planted seeds. They did a lot more than that. They managed to change social policy in relation to people with disability in Ireland.
The difficulty with producing this book is that Martin passed before the manuscript was completed. Even in death, this man managed to remain somewhat elusive. The suggestion that he would trust the writer Joanna Marsden to carry out his wishes by documenting his experience gives us a glimpse of what Martin saw as his role. He was an ideas man. The rest of us had to chisel and nail those ideas into something practical and functional. Martin was complex, often closed off emotionally, warm but not always free. He was a private man with a public persona. My admiration goes to Joanna who had to work on notes and conversations with Martin, and who 19essentially had to do a lot of her own research.
The book is a tribute not just to Martin but to people around him, the work they’ve done and the accessible paths through education and independent living that were created because of Martin’s leadership and vision. The book itself is innovative in that it documents the growth of the disability movement here in Ireland and worldwide. It’s also, and probably more importantly, a definite celebration of disabled lives.
Martin continuously attempted to move out of a place that was designated to him. That place was segregated, held only for the poor, the disabled. Martin, who lived his life during six decades of great change in Ireland, absolutely believed that designated space was too small for him. He recognised from an early age that he and those around him did not live in a vacuum. He used that segregated space as a platform to build the political consciousness of five generations of Irish disabled people. While he abhorred exclusion and discrimination resulting in low expectations and lack of citizenship, Martin managed to build momentum within that segregated area, so that the struggle for change became a collective journey.
From Connemara to Dublin, from Dublin to Boston, DC and Berkeley, and then in his final year on to Montgomery, Alabama, Martin’s nomadic spirit was very much influenced by Connemara culture as well as Irish culture. He wanted to spread the fire of the American Civil Rights and Independent Living Movements and capture the spirit and the energy of the anti-racist movement, bringing that drive into the disability movement and disability politics.
In his later years, Martin reengaged with music, and nostalgia for the Miami Showband was one of his few pleasures. He was a busy man, a man that had things to do, a man with a huge memory and an ever-expanding 20heart full of generosity. He was a player. He knew politics, be it big, small or partisan. He could work a room. His charisma surpassed your average charmer.
For me, there are no early memories or first memories of Martin. He was just there. He was in charge, a man that would get things done. A man that fooled us all into believing that Baldoyle Hospital Sports Club with its disabled athletes was about winning medals. It wasn’t. The Sports Club was not only about showcasing talent, but it was also about integration, about getting young people from the local area to come into the segregated hospital environment so young people with and without disabilities could mix. Martin saw the value in these symbolic friendships across divides. If we, the residents of Baldoyle Hospital, could not access the world, then the outside world could be brought in to us.
Martin saw potential not just in the winners but in people like me, those of us who were mediocre. Those of us that were often quickly written off or erased. Many of us were lucky enough to sit around and listen to him while he told us stories of what was happening in Berkeley, California during the eighties and nineties. He managed to convince us that if Independent Living could happen over there, it could also happen here in Ireland. He was the first man I knew who had his own accessible transport; the first man I knew who managed to live in his own house. He galvanised a group of people like me to start to demand higher expectations for ourselves. That higher expectation was built on a strong collective self-esteem which poked and prodded service providers to do what hadn’t been done before. For many of us when we got in trouble Martin was the one that we would call. That trouble, regardless of the magnitude, was very often not understood by a non-disabled person. Rights and self-determination: this was the language he gave us.21
Martin also paid for my confirmation outfit. He paid for the hotel where I celebrated with my family after I got my degree. In those days it wasn’t just about money, it was about Travellers knowing a settled person and being able to use a settled person’s name to gain access.
Martin spoke beautiful Irish. In the middle of a conversation, he would sporadically use sentences and words, almost forgetting the present moment and briefly running back to Connemara, if not physically most definitely spiritually and linguistically. He was a passionate man, a man that could easily make you cry. A man that would notice when you went off the radar. He would send someone to find you.
In the months before Martin died in October 2016 he had buried a number of his fellow Center for Independent Living members and founders. Together these founders were known as ‘The Magnificent Seven’. The fragility of life and fragility of disabled bodies were ever present in those three years before Martin passed. For many of us, we were still living our dream. For some, this meant having received a service package for Personal Assistance hours, for others it was about being able to buy their own accessible vehicle or being able to use accessible public transport. He had built a movement, a concept, a message, a philosophy, a legacy that younger disabled people have inherited without questioning its origins.
Martin died just weeks after going into hospital in late August 2016. Those of us who he left behind were worried about our social and cultural influence without our great leader. Many of us were angry. He left no instructions or no warning. It took me a while to realise that was Martin. He absolutely believed young people would reshape and rejuvenate the Independent Living Movement in Ireland. His last words to me were, ‘Make room for strangers and keep our fire lit.’
Prologue
Martin and Barbara in their first year at St Mary’s Orthopaedic Hospital for Children in Baldoyle. Probably taken in spring/summer 1964 when Martin was nine or ten, and Barbara seven or eight. Martin had begun using a wheelchair most of the time but transferred to the bench for the photo.
I have never blamed my parents for sending my sister Barbara and me away from our family home in the Irish-speaking seaside village of Spiddal in County Galway to St Mary’s Orthopaedic Hospital for 23Children in Baldoyle, Dublin. Powerful religious orders funded residential institutions for children with physical disabilities like us, but neither they nor the State offered any practical, therapeutic or financial support to parents who kept their disabled children at home. No one spoke to any parent and said, ‘What services do you need?’ No one said, ‘Well, there’s this and that available.’ Huge institutions like St Mary’s were Ireland’s Welfare State.
In 1963, the year the decision to send us to St Mary’s was made, my mother was fifty years old. Her skin was a little rosy, but she had high cheekbones and a certain fineness to her. She wore her greying brown hair in a loose bun, and when at home, had a neat floral apron tied around her waist. She had given birth to ten children, and though still sprightly enough, I think our new local doctor, who was a bright young woman with something of a feminist perspective, may well have looked at her and asked, ‘Is it right that this woman, who has already raised a big family, should surrender the rest of her life to being a full-time carer for two young disabled people?’
In later years, I think everyone in the family wondered whether a mistake had been made, but I reminded them that it is society – and the supports it does or does not offer to families – that really makes these decisions. What choice did my parents, and hundreds of others like them, really have?
Chapter 1
Day One
I was nine years old when the day came for my younger sister Barbara and me to leave Spiddal. It was 4 October 1963. That Friday morning the Galway bus, which passed through the village once a day, came by arrangement to the door of the bungalow my father had just finished building. My father handed our small suitcase to the driver and lifted Barbara and me over the metal step. As I made my way towards my seat, holding onto the back of each chair as I passed, it was the last time he would see me walking.
One of our older sisters, Mairéad, had been given the job of accompanying us the whole way to Baldoyle in Dublin, where the Sisters at St Mary’s Orthopaedic Hospital for Children were expecting us. Mairéad was only seventeen, but she spoke decent English and had a good helping of common sense.
In Galway, Mairéad got the three of us safely onto the Dublin train, where we sat beside a family with children who offered to let us share their toys. Barbara pushed Dinky cars up and down the aisle on her knees, but I stayed in my seat by the window, propping my shoulder against the frame to hold myself upright. I watched the unfamiliar faces get on and off at each station. Though I had taken the train to Athenry a few times, I had never travelled this far.25
The Phoenix Park Tunnel as captured from an approaching train on the Kingsbridge side of the tunnel, c. 1959.
As we approached Dublin, the train entered a tunnel. It was the first time I’d been in a tunnel, and the way the lights flashed on seconds after the darkness engulfed us was thrilling. In the years afterwards, I often wondered if I had imagined this tunnel, because I never travelled through it again, and it seemed so dramatic in my memory – as if it marked the moment we passed from one world into another.
The train came to a halt at Westland Row Station. Our parents had given strict instructions that we were to wait in our carriage until Micheál Ó Bríain, one of our neighbours from Spiddal who was living in Dublin, came to collect us.1 The three of us sat there as the minutes passed. We started to think he wasn’t coming. One of the station staff stepped on board and tried to encourage us to disembark, but Mairéad insisted we had to wait for Micheál.
The train’s engines started again as the driver readied it for the journey to its next destination – the ferry terminal in Dún Laoghaire, I think – and 26just in time Micheál stepped onto the carriage and swept us off. I felt a rush of excitement as we entered the vast station building. Micheál Ó Bríain, or Mickeen as he was known to us, worked as a ‘resident’ actor in the Abbey Theatre and he must have been a well-known face in Dublin, because passers-by greeted him enthusiastically.
He led the three of us out of the station into the damp afternoon and at our slow pace we made our way past rows of tall houses and shops with unfamiliar names until we reached the swollen Liffey and crossed to a bus stop on the quays.
Like most people, Barbara and I knew our destination only as the ‘Little Willie’, after the boy who appeared in newspaper adverts as the mascot of the hospital’s fundraising campaigns. Little Willie wore callipers to help him stand and the slogan beside him said, ‘Help Little Willie who cannot help himself’.
The interior of Westland Row Station (now Pearse Street Station), where Martin, Barbara and Mairéad arrived and were met by Micheál Ó Bríain. Photograph 1967.
Spiddal native Micheál Ó Bríain. This photograph of Micheál was used in the Abbey Theatre programmes in the 1960s.27
‘Little Willie’, the young boy who featured in hospital fundraising campaigns, is pictured here (wearing callipers) with an unidentified girl and comedy legends Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. The occasion is the presentation of a cheque on behalf of Premier (DOMAS) to the Little Willie Fund in September 1953.
The Number 32 bus was a double-decker, but we sat on the lower floor close to the driver, Micheál and I sharing one seat, and Mairéad and Barbara sharing the one behind. As we travelled northwards out of the city, I looked out the steamed-up window at the grey buildings and thought how enormous everything was and how the roads in Dublin went on forever.
‘That way to Croke Park,’ Micheál said, pointing left.
‘This is Annesley Bridge,’ he said. ‘We’re coming into Fairview now.’
I’d not been to a capital city before. Galway was the only city I’d seen. I thought how I’d better shape up if I was going to take care of Barbara and 28myself in this unfamiliar place.
‘Where’s the “Little Willie”, Micheál?’ I asked in Irish.
‘I’ve not been there, Martin, but don’t you worry, we are on the right bus.’
I found it strange that Micheál could not tell us exactly where the hospital was since it was clear he knew the rest of Dublin like the back of his hand.
It felt like hours, but when I saw grey flat-roofed blocks looming behind the small, terraced cottages of Baldoyle Village and the driver gave Micheál a nod, I wondered how anybody in Dublin, let alone Micheál, could not know where the Little Willie was.
An aerial photo of Baldoyle in 1962, as taken for an ‘Aeroviews’ postcard, showing the recently built St Mary’s Orthopaedic Hospital for Children in Baldoyle.
St Mary’s Orthopaedic Hospital for Children, as the Little Willie was officially called, was a sprawling complex, with the hospital part at the south 29end and the Convent of the Sisters of Charity at the north end, close to the village bus stop. The four of us wandered in through the convent door, which had been left ajar by a lady with a mop and bucket. Micheál left us on a bench in the hall while he went ahead to introduce himself.
He returned minutes later, having been chastised by one of the Sisters.
‘They’re giving out because we’ve come in the wrong door,’ he said.
Taking a quick look behind him, he puffed up his chest and stuck his chin in the air to mimic the Sister, ‘That door, Mr Ó Bríain, is strictly out of bounds to patients.’2
