Neil Lennon: Man and Bhoy

Both my parents were warm and sociable people with a wide circle of friends and I am sure that it is from them that I get my love of sharing a good time with family and companions. My mother says I was a brilliant baby who slept and ate well, and was no trouble at all—nice to know I haven’t changed…

As any man who has been brought up in a household with three sisters will tell you, they spoil you and drive you daft in equal proportions. For instance, I don’t think I’ve ever won an argument with Orla in my life. But then she is a superb debater and orator, and in 1985 she reached the Northern Ireland final of the All-Ireland Public Speaking Championships. When she was fifteen she went on a trip to Bangladesh for three weeks as a prize for winning a speaking contest at school. Orla’s feats were reported in all the local newspapers and for a time she got bigger headlines than her wee brother. She later became a very fine teacher and is now married with two boys.

Like many people in Ireland, my dad went over to England to find work in the 1960s. He had a job at the Bedford truck factory in Luton but he came back to Lurgan—just as well he did, for that was when he and my mum encountered each other. The story is always told in our family that my mum met my dad at a dance in the town, and on that very first night she went home and told my grandparents that she had met the man she was going to marry. I am not sure whether or not that was my father’s reaction, but knowing my mum’s quiet determination, he was a lost cause to bachelorhood from that night on.

Dad worked as a foreman in an electronics factory but had to take premature retirement because he developed a debilitating illness which often leaves him very tired, but by and large he has not allowed it to affect him too much.

My earliest memories are of our house in Edward Street in the middle of Lurgan where we first lived. There was just Orla and me at the time. Between our house and my grandfather’s shop across the road, there was a long line of concrete barrels all joined together with metal piping. They were there to stop people parking their cars in the centre of town. In the 1970s, car bombs were a regular feature of life in towns across Northern Ireland, and the barriers were then supposed to prevent the bombers from getting access to the main shopping areas in Lurgan.

The security paraphernalia made life difficult at times, but I suppose that was the price we had to pay in order to live some kind of normal life in relative safety. As a child you do not realize the seriousness of events going on around you, and it is only in recent years, after what has happened to me, that I realize what a strain it must have been for my parents to raise children at such a time and in such a place.

We were constantly being evacuated from the house because of bomb scares which were usually, but not always, hoaxes. I remember one Friday afternoon very vividly. That was the day my mother always made her special stew which I loved and which was a real highlight of the week for me. I was starving that day and could barely wait to start. My sister Orla was carrying the pot from the oven to the dinner table when a huge explosion shook the house. A bomb had gone off somewhere in the town and the noise was absolutely deafening. Orla got a terrible fright, dropped the pot and burst out crying. My mother went over to comfort her but I was more upset that she had spilled the stew all over the floor and gave her pelters!

The local council had plans to develop the area around our house—they finally did it twenty-odd years later, as you can tell by the name Millennium Way—and in 1976 we were moved to a new house at Richmount Gardens on Taghnevan estate on the edge of town. Jane had been born the year before and my youngest sister Aileen arrived in 1978. There were now four Lennon children—I don’t know how my mother coped with all of us, but she did so magnificently.

Apart from the occasional inconveniences of life in Ulster at that time in the 1970s, I have to say I had a very happy childhood.

Fortunately for us, no members of my family were killed or injured in the Troubles, but one of my former schoolmates was not so lucky. Dennis Carville was one of the many people who died because they just happened to be of the wrong religion in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It was on 6 October 1990 that he was murdered. By then I was living in Stockport in England. I learned of the tragedy shortly after it happened and immediately recalled from schooldays a decent lad, an ordinary boy who would never have got mixed up in sectarian politics or fighting.

He was in his car with his girlfriend at a nature reserve, Oxford Island, at the south end of Lough Neagh. They had gone for some peace and quiet to a lover’s lane which was well known as such in Lurgan. A fortnight previously, a part-time soldier from the Ulster Defence Regiment, Colin McCullough, had been killed by the IRA as he sat in a car with his girlfriend at the same place.

As Dennis sat there, a paramilitary from one of the Loyalist groups came up and knocked on the window. Dressed as a soldier, he asked to see Dennis’s driving licence and as soon as he had established that Dennis was a Catholic, the gunman shot him dead in cold blood at a range of only inches. A Loyalist extremist group later let it be known that they had killed my Catholic former schoolmate in revenge for the murder of the Protestant UDR man.

It was one of many tit-for-tat killings during the Troubles, and it could have been any one of us Catholic boys from Lurgan who got the bullet that killed Dennis. He was just nineteen when he died, exactly the same age as myself at the time.

It was the banshee howl of the Troubles that I remember most.

Taghnevan was an almost totally Catholic/Republican/ nationalist estate—for the uninitiated, I should explain that many towns in Northern Ireland have their own system of virtual apartheid, with people from the Protestant/Unionist/ Loyalist tradition and the Catholics/Republicans/Nationalists both occupying their own enclaves and largely keeping themselves to themselves. It came as a shock to me when I moved to mainland Britain to discover that people of different faiths and cultures all lived together, cheek by jowl in the same streets and apartment blocks.

The worst period for tension and violence was undoubtedly the time of the hunger strikes in the early 1980s. The country was on the edge of all-out civil war during that long campaign by the Republican prisoners, led by Bobby Sands who, despite being in prison, had been elected an MP shortly before he died from the effects of self-starvation.

You could always tell when a hunger striker had died. As soon as news of the death broke, no matter whether it was in the dead of night or during the day, people would come out of the houses and would start to bang metal bin lids, either thrashing two together or thumping them off the pavement. Whistles would be blown at the highest possible volume, and men and women would shout the news. The noise would spread through the estate and sometimes there would be women wailing and frightened children screaming. I was only nine or ten at the time, but I can remember that cacophony as if it was yesterday. On one occasion a hunger striker died at about 4 a.m. and the noise of the bin lids and the shouts of protest reverberated around the estate in an unearthly manner. It was as if the banshee of ancient Irish folklore had suddenly come to life in Lurgan. I was truly frightened as I lay in my bed wondering how long the noise would go on for and what would happen the next day—in many places across Northern Ireland there would be riots and shootings. I knew why the noisy protest was taking place, of course, but I had no real concept of the underlying problems which had caused the Troubles to start in the first place.

My parents always did their best to shield us from the Troubles but there were occasions when the grim realities of that time just could not be avoided, as when the hunger strikers died. Mostly, however, we just tried to get on with our lives as normally as possible, which I suspect was the attitude of the vast majority of people in Lurgan and elsewhere in Northern Ireland.

The price of safety was constant vigilance. My mother and father would watch out like hawks for any problems in the streets around our house and at the first sign of any trouble we would be hauled indoors. ‘Trouble’ usually consisted of gangs of boys taunting the security services or throwing stones at police vehicles. The girls kept out of the road but it was accepted practice for boys of my age and older teenagers to take part in this frequent ritual. I have to confess I got caught up in a couple of episodes of stone-throwing largely because it was second nature to several friends of mine. Peer pressure can be a terrible thing at that age, and it was only later when I had moved to England that I realized that the police had actually been there to protect us. Of course I would later require their services on a couple of occasions in Belfast, as I have already described.

You could try to avoid the Troubles, as we did as a family, but you could never ignore them. One of my uncles on my father’s side had been born long before the Beatles came on the scene or else my grandparents might have called him something other than John. He was stopped by the police one night and of course they asked him for his name. ‘John Lennon,’ was his truthful reply. ‘Aye,’ said the cop, ‘and I’m John Wayne,’ before throwing him in the back of the police vehicle.

A real character, my uncle John sadly died three years ago. But then all the Lennons were characters. My father’s brother Francie went to a big Gaelic football match at Croke Park in Dublin, and that was the last my grandfather Frank and grandmother Jane saw of him for ten years. He joined the Irish Navy and in 1953, was the wireless operator who intercepted the first distress signal from the Stranraer-Larne 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 where he had friends and relatives. But by the age of ten I was playing every Saturday and I much preferred to play rather than watch. However, I used to love listening to the stories of those who did go over to Parkhead, and I suppose I got a bit jealous of those who had seen my heroes.

My favourite player as a youngster was Kenny Dalglish. He had it all—great skill with either foot, amazing strength in the penalty box, and the vision to make telling passes or take up perfect positions. He had been largely unheralded outside Scotland before his record-breaking move to Liverpool, but it was no surprise to those of us who idolized him that he quickly made his mark in England and Europe, and went on to become a legend at Anfield. In modern times, Kenny is the king of Celtic players as far as I am concerned, and only Henrik Larsson ranks alongside him.

From the outset with Lurgan Celtic’s boys’ side and with St Peter’s primary’s team, I was a prolific goalscorer. I played on the right wing for the club but for the school I played at centre-forward and I really did score a barrowload. That may come as something of a shock to those Celtic fans who have seen me score precisely three times in the five-and-a-half seasons that I have been at Parkhead. But as a youngster I scored regularly, almost week in and week out, both for my schools teams and for my clubs, and while still at primary school, a headline appeared in my local newspaper ‘Lennon Hits Three’.

At the same time as I was starting out in football, I was also learning the ropes in Gaelic football. While there are similarities between the two sports, the latter involves handling and passing the ball from hand or foot. From the start I loved them both, but soccer—I’ll use that term to avoid confusion—was always my preferred version.

Junior soccer was given quite good coverage in the local press, and my family have newspaper clippings to prove that I was something of a goalscoring sensation. I particularly remember playing in five-a-side and indoor tournaments, and I think the first picture of me in a newspaper was when we won the Craigavon Festival Under-11 trophy. Also in that five was Gerry Taggart, who would become a lifelong friend and a very fine professional footballer. Gerry and I also played in the Lurgan Celtic team which was chosen to represent Armagh in the Ulster age group finals at the Community Games in Letterkenny, County Donegal. Gerry scored two as we won the final 6-1 against Monaghan, and I got a hat-trick inside fifteen minutes—a little different to my scoring ratio with Celtic of one goal every two seasons!

The national finals of the All-Ireland Community Games at Butlins’ Irish camp at Mosney was a very prestigious tournament, and Gerry Taggart and myself were both picked for the Lurgan area Under-12 side which represented Armagh in the games. Scouts from senior clubs in Britain watched the final in which we beat Galway on penalties thanks largely to goalkeeper Dee Horisk saving three of their spot kicks.

Butlins camp at Mosney would become a regular haunt for me. In September 1983, several of us who had won the soccer trophy returned to contest the Community Games Gaelic football final, which was played for the Charles Haughey Perpetual Cup. Gerry Taggart, Dee Horisk and I all played for the Craigavon select eleven which won this trophy competed for by sides from all over Ireland.

I loved our visits to Butlins, because apart from the football there were all sorts of fun and games for youngsters. There was an amusement park attached to the camp and when we weren’t playing matches, we could be found there having a whale of a time.

In my last year at St Peter’s, I was selected for the Mid-Ulster District Primary Schools Team to play in various tournaments. It was as a result of playing well for the Mid-Ulster side that I first came to the attention of the Northern Ireland schoolboy team selectors.

The official records showed that in my final year at primary school, I played all five games for Mid-Ulster against the likes of Belfast and East Antrim, scoring five of our fourteen goals as we finished second in the league. I nearly always played up front at that time, and it was the same in Gaelic football where I occupied one or other of the forward positions and liked nothing better than to score goals or points.

When I left primary school, I first attended St Paul’s junior high school, for boys aged from eleven to fourteen, and here again football was my main preoccupation. I was just eleven and in my first year when I was selected to play for the school Under-13 side. We were a very good side under the charge of teacher Mr Kevin O’Neill, and I remember we beat our great rivals Killicomaine School to win the local school league and cup double. Again, I scored a hat-trick in the cup final, and we got our team picture with both trophies in the Lurgan Mail—always a sure sign of success.

As well as playing for St Paul’s I was by then enjoying myself with Lurgan Celtic. Our Under-13 team went through the entire season unbeaten and won the Michael Casey Memorial Cup into the bargain. I also had my first taste of ‘foreign’ football when I went over to Scotland and played against Greenock Shamrocks and Greenock Boys Club. Shamrock at that time had one of the best young teams around and had strong links to Celtic. We beat them 3-2 and I remember the trip well as it was my first visit to Glasgow and I got to meet some of my relatives on my father’s side who lived in Scotland.