ferry Princess Victoria which sank in the Irish Sea during a massive storm, with the loss of more than 130 lives. He later went to England and joined the RAF, ending up in Hull.
I have vivid memories of many of the major events of the Troubles when I was growing up, such as the murder of Airey Neave MP, the bombing which killed Earl Mountbatten, and the explosions which killed eighteen soldiers at Warren-point. That last incident took place on a bank holiday at a place just down the road from Lurgan, so the whole area was very tense for some time afterwards with police and soldiers everywhere.
As I grew older, I became more aware of the history and tragedies which had led to the Troubles, but I did not let things influence me and was never tempted to get involved in politics. To be truthful, I was just too busy playing football and Gaelic football to get sucked into what was going on around me.
As for religion, I was raised a Catholic. I was baptized in St Peter’s Church in Lurgan and made my first Holy Communion and received confirmation in St Paul’s Church which served Taghnevan. The influence of my parents was strong—we were taught to live as Christians and show a good example, rather than flaunt our religion ostentatiously.
The people of Lurgan lived for their sport. Football, or rather soccer, was followed avidly in the town, but there was also a great deal of interest in horse racing and boxing, and in the Nationalist areas of the town, Gaelic football was played with a passion. There were about ten Gaelic football clubs and school teams in the town at one time or another. Hurling was nowhere near as popular as football of either variety, and there were quite a few of us who played both Gaelic football and soccer, though in some parts of Ireland that was very much frowned upon—soccer was seen as an alien English game by Irish cultural traditionalists.
Practically since I had learned to walk I had kicked a football around, playing with my mates in the streets or local parks and playgrounds. But it was thanks to the schools and local boys’ clubs that I got to play ‘proper’ organized matches on real pitches.
I attended St Joseph’s Primary School in Lurgan, known as the infant school, for the first three years of my education, followed by St Peter’s for primary four to seven. The two schools were beside each other and were later amalgamated into St Thomas’s.
After St Peter’s I attended St Paul’s junior high school, where I sat and passed the exams which enabled me to go on to St Michael’s Grammar School, which was the senior high school for the Catholic youth of Lurgan.
I think I was a good pupil and tried hard to learn, but in all my schools my main interest was football. We played bounce games in the playground with piles of jerseys for goalposts, after school was finished we would go home for our dinner and then go back out to play more football in the local parks, as long as there was light to play by.
I soon realized that I loved football and was not too bad at it at all. There were other young boys around the town who were pretty good, too, one of them being Gerry Taggart, who you will read more about later.
The only thing that caused more excitement in school than football was a playground scrap. There would be a big circle of us, maybe three or four deep, around the two combatants, and we would egg on the fighters, especially if one of them was a mate. Nobody ever got really badly hurt in those schoolboy battles, and invariably the teachers would arrive to break them up and we would soon get back to playing football.
Despite the Troubles and economic recession, Lurgan’s people were very resilient and there was a great determination on the part of many men and women that the children of the town should lead as normal lives as possible.
When I look back and think of all the sacrifices that people made just so we could get a game of football I am in awe of their commitment to the sport. Getting us kit and a place to play, transporting us all over the county and beyond, coaching us, keeping us safe and arranging for some of us to be looked at by senior teams—and all this against a background of the Troubles. Later in life I was able to repay some of my debt to those people in Lurgan by donating some money for training younger children to play football. But it was small change compared to what I and many other players owed for the start we were given.
I will be eternally grateful to Dessie Meginnis in particular. He was the local ‘Mr Football’ and took me under his wing from the very start when I joined Lurgan Celtic Boys Club at the age of ten. Dessie was the Pied Piper of Lurgan—wherever you saw him he had a bag of footballs and a bunch of kids following him. He had the nickname ‘bunker’, but I never found out why.
His enthusiasm for football was infectious, and no one knew more about the schoolboy scene in Northern Ireland than Dessie, who also had good links with Celtic in Glasgow. It’s amazing to think that he started the careers of Gerry Taggart and myself on more or less the same day in the same boys’ team, and we both went on to play for Northern Ireland. Dessie not only taught you good habits on the field but he also encouraged you to behave well off it. He would say things like ‘be first on the training ground and the last off it’, and give you a friendly word of encouragement when you needed it. I still call or go to see him for advice to this day.
My dad always supported me in my football ambitions but he tended to stay in the background. Mum and he provided me with my early boots and strips, as I used to beg them for football equipment each Christmas, but Dad rarely came to watch me play, though there was a good reason for that. He had gone to see me a couple times but did not like the comments and the actions of parents on the sidelines. Dad was worried that if he came to a match and somebody criticized me, he would lose his temper and smack them, so he chose to stay away. He was quite right, too, because some of the insults were terrible, and the worst offenders were often women who clearly did not realize the pressure they were putting on young children.
As well as playing the game, we Lurgan boys were also passionate about the teams we supported. Most people I know become football supporters at a young age when they choose their team to follow by some strange process that sometimes defies scientific analysis.
Throughout Ireland, British football is the game of choice for fans. The fortunes of Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool and the other big English clubs are followed closely by tens of thousands of people, many of whom rarely see their heroes in the flesh. In Northern Ireland, for not always the best of reasons, the two clubs with the biggest support are Celtic and Rangers. Dozens of buses leave Belfast, Derry and elsewhere for Scotland every weekend of the season, with people travelling on segregated buses and ferries. The colours of the two teams are seen everywhere, though they are never side by side. That’s just a fact of life in Northern Ireland.
The dedication of those fans to the Old Firm clubs is unbelievable. It is almost like a pilgrimage for them. Those who come over from Donegal, for instance, have to get up at four in the morning and then after the match they have to leave straight away in order to be on time for the boat home.
For as long as I can remember, my team was Celtic. My dad supported them, most of the rest of the family were fans, and they were very important to us and to many people in our community, as shown by the fact that one of the biggest clubs in the town was called Lurgan Celtic. It just seemed natural to follow Celtic, even if they played many miles away in Scotland, and as a fan, I dreamed of one day playing for them.
Live football was a rare thing on television when I was a boy. We did not have satellite television in those days, and you only got to see European games now and again, but we would avidly watch any scraps of highlights shown.
I actually saw Celtic in the flesh, so to speak, on two occasions as a young boy. They played a friendly match in Dundalk which is not far south of Lurgan, and my dad took me to see them. The second time was as a special treat as I went with Lurgan Celtic Boys Club to see them play Aberdeen in the Scottish Cup semi-final of 1983 when I was not quite twelve years old. It was a tremendous experience, and I was amazed at the sheer number of people all around me. The noise and the colours made it a real adventure, but the ending wasn’t so great—the Hoops were beaten 1-0 by Alex Ferguson’s fine side who were then at their peak and went on to win the cup.
I could have gone to more games as there were buses and cars which left from Lurgan and my dad occasionally went to Glasgow