Never Know Your Place: Memoir of a Rulebreaker
O’Brien Press Launch of ‘Never Know Your Place Memoir of A Rulebreaker’ by Martin Naughton with Joanna Marsden & activist James Cawley. Photo: Fennell Photography
TULCA Festival publication/journal
Never Know Your Place
‘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.)
I was asked to co-write the memoir of activist Martin Naughton, widely considered to be 20th century Ireland’s most significant disabled activist. Never Know Your Place: Memoir of a Rulebreaker (O’Brien Press) was published in March 2024.
The story of Never Know Your Place
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.
An excerpt from Never Know Your Place featured in the publication of the TULCA Visual Arts Festival in Galway (November 2023).
Extraordinary Lives
(A commissioned collection of interviews on disability social history)
Extraordinary Lives (a commissioned social history)
In 2011, I was commissioned to write Extraordinary Lives, a 148-page book of interviews with 15 disabled people whose personal stories reflect the way in which life for disabled people has changed in Ireland. Beginning in 1960, an era in which many people with disabilities lived ‘behind closed doors’ in family homes or institutions, the book tells the story of the emergence of the independent living movement and Paralympic sport. The book was launched by Myles Dungan, and writing in The Irish Times, Sylvia Thompson said it offered “huge insight into the changes in the personal and public lives of those with a physical disability in the past 50 years.”