We moved again, this time south. I was put in a school, in the middle of Cara Park, a traveller site in Coolock, where there were a few pre-fab buildings in the centre. One of these little units was a school for travellers, and us young lads went there. There were about six or seven of us of the same age going through the last stage of school at the same time, and this is where the one thing that did change things for me came about. The school at least showed some interest in getting me through my religious education, and a little nun educated me for my Confirmation. Sister Clare gave me all the prayers I needed and told me how to respond to the questions I was asked.
The day came for my Confirmation, and that day I wore a blazer. My father and mother were there, watching proudly, as were other traveller families because others were confirmed at the same time. One of them was my friend Turkey’s Paddy; we’d got on famously since we’d met. Not long afterwards his family moved on to Newry and he went swimming in a river and drowned. Turkey’s Paddy was buried in Dundalk. His mother, Maggie, came over to me at the funeral and said, ‘James, you and Paddy will never play together again,’ and I cried. I was still only a child and I’d never before experienced losing someone that close to me. I just didn’t know what that meant until the moment Turkey’s Paddy’s mother spoke to me at the funeral. She knew how close the two of us had been, and as a token of that, when she had her next child she called him James.
As soon as I could after I was confirmed, I left school, and we went away and travelled. As a travelling family was mostly moving around in the summer and working in the fields in the autumn, there wasn’t a lot of time for me to go to school anyway. I left school at 12. I’d never liked it.
My mother had only sent me to school to be prepared for my Confirmation, and once that was finished she didn’t care any more about my education. People care now. As a parent now myself I have very different feelings about education. The times have changed and what was considered OK then would not be allowed now. Back then, traveller kids were considered second class, second rate, and it didn’t interest those in charge that we weren’t getting an education. Travellers are no longer left behind and ignored in classes; in some schools, like the one my sons went to in Dundalk, there are classes just for travellers. Some see this as special treatment but I don’t, because I think traveller children have a long way to go to catch up with settled children, who are used to the idea of school, expect it, and welcome it. It will take a long time for education to become a habit for all traveller families. You can’t make that happen just by wanting it; you have to change the way everybody else thinks about it too, and that is a long-term project.
In later life I taught myself to read and write, but as a young boy the only thing I liked about school was learning about religion. All traveller families are religious, some more than others perhaps, but they all believe in God. Some may be sarcastic about it, they may do wrong, but they also believe in Holy Mother Mary and in Jesus Christ. That has never left me; as an adult I have even been on pilgrimages overseas, to Fatima in Portugal, for instance. A lot of travellers go to Lourdes. I try to attend Mass every Sunday. I believe in Heaven – that when someone has been good they will go there – and I believe in Hell. I believe in a lot of angels. The Holy Trinity is tattooed on my back. Religion is probably the most important constant in traveller life, and all families bring their children up to believe in God and to go to Mass. A newborn child must be christened, because travellers believe that a child doesn’t prosper or improve until they get that original sin taken away from them by being baptised into the Church. We pray for those who have died, we pray for their souls, we pray for each other. My wife is a very religious person. Theresa will say the Rosary every day and she will never miss Mass. She’ll walk five or even ten miles to attend.
Although I’d left school I was still unable to go and join my father in his work – I was too young – so instead I had to work at a training centre for young travelling kids. AnCo was the name of the organisation, and they would teach me a skill that would enable me to become an apprentice in a job. I chose carpentry but it was never really my thing. I did it for a while, mostly because I was paid £30.30 a week to stay on there at AnCo.
The first week I had that money in my hands I went out to spend it right away. When we were doing the farming work, all we ever got was pocket money because all that we were earning was needed to keep the home going. It meant so much to me to have my own money to spend at last. I knew what I wanted to buy first: a bike. That way I could get out, go anywhere I wanted. The second week, I bought a tape deck so I could listen to music. The third week, I bought some clothes: Shakin’ Stevens was big then with his hit ‘This Ole House’ and I bought some clothes like his. White trainers, tight jeans, a Levi jacket, black shirt, white tie: that was Shakin’ Stevens’s look on his album cover and I got it. But it wasn’t a Shakin’ Stevens record I bought first; it was Rod Stewart’s ‘Baby Jane’. I liked Rod, still do, and country and western too, and we’d dance to the records at the teenage disco that was held on the site once a week. I was happy with what I was doing: I was earning some money, I spent Friday nights at the disco, and the rest of the weekend hunting. And I went boxing.
I’d started boxing for two reasons. The first was that I hated being pushed around by other kids, and from a young age found myself bullied. Certain settled kids in Mullingar were bullies; they were a clan of their own, and a little gang of them would go about the place trying to find someone to pick on. They’d never value anything we said or did. That has all changed since those days, and when my sons were at school they learned that settled kids often look up to traveller kids. But it wasn’t like that when I was young. If a game of football or of handball was going on, I’d go to join in and these kids – who weren’t playing themselves – would stop me, push me off the field, and hit me. If they were playing and it was our turn to play, they’d push me away, kick me up the arse, shove me, slap me on the head. They would hit me hard enough to make me cry, and crying is embarrassing when you’re that age. No one would stop them because they knew that they’d get the same thing if they tried.
It wasn’t just settled kids who were the problem. I remember one time at Cara Park, I was playing with two friends on the roof of a pre-fab. Another kid came along, older than us but shorter, and told us to stay up there or he’d punch us. We were that petrified of him that we stayed up there on the roof even when he went away, and only crept down when it got to about two in the morning. There we were, the three of us, all taller than him, and we still wouldn’t come down. That’s the power bullies have over people.
I didn’t have many friends then. I’d make friends easily, but if we didn’t move off after a few weeks, then their families did. When you’re that age you really look for someone to be your friend, especially if you feel you’re picked on otherwise. So perhaps it wasn’t a surprise that I fell in with some people who lived near Cara Park, in Belcamp House, a mansion that later burned down. They were a charismatic Christian group and I started going there just for the fun of it and then really got into attending the prayer meetings and other events they organised. I made some good friends there and for a while I became very serious about being involved in their kind of Roman Catholicism. For two years I was going to prayer meetings on Tuesdays and Thursdays, as well as Mass on Sundays. Saturdays we’d meet for bible study. It’s a surprise that I had time for anything else.
My greatest friends at Belcamp House were an American family called Cullins. Brendan Cullins was around my age and became my particular friend. The family moved back to the States and – it just goes to show the difference an education can make – Brendan went on to be a brain surgeon, while I ended up someone who goes to country lanes to bash people in the face for a living.
As kids we’d always boxed a bit. We couldn’t always play football or whatever game we wanted, but boxing was something else we could do near to the site. When we came back from picking spuds or wherever we’d been, if there wasn’t time to run off and get a game going, we could stay by the trailer and box. I’d always known I wasn’t very good at football, much as I liked to run about. I was always last to be picked to go on someone’s team, and when there’s fifteen to twenty kids standing on the pitch waiting to get the game going, this can be embarrassing. I was always the last one chosen because everyone knew that no