My mother did her best to visit me in the orphanage. She had a tough life but I adored her
Paul McGrath reflects on two great losses in his life this year – his mum and Jack Charlton – and how both shaped his life
WHEN news broke about the death of Paul McGrath’s mother Betty, the outpouring of support for the former Republic of Ireland star was as heartfelt as it was widespread. McGrath occupies a special place in the hearts of Irish people and we all know how close he was to his mother. For a man as tough and strong as he was on the pitch, there’s a vulnerability about him that gives us the sense that he needs protection from the harshness of life.
He announced news of her death on Twitter, where he said: ‘My beautiful Mum Betty passed away peacefully and today my heart is breaking. I owe everything to her.’ A month on from Betty’s passing, it’s still very raw for the Dubliner.
‘We really were close,’ he tells me from his home in Wexford. ‘It was a strange time for me because I didn’t understand the whole thing of dying and stuff like that. It’s horrendous when you’re up close and personal with it. Loads of people are going through it at this moment in time. For me, it was just, your best friend saying goodbye.’
McGrath, 59, and Betty didn’t get off to the best start. Betty was left pregnant after a brief relationship with McGrath’s father, a Nigerian medical student, who she met in a nightclub in Dublin.
Afraid to tell her parents, she gave birth in London before giving the baby up for foster care and, later, an orphanage.
Though Betty didn’t take care of him fulltime, she always did her best to visit him, an act that he remembers with great fondness.
‘My mum, even was I was in Dun Laoghaire, she always came out to see me,’ he says of
‘For me, it was just, your best friend saying goodbye’
his time in the Bird’s Nest orphanage. ‘She had to get two buses and she had a job. My sister lived with my mum and it was tough for her to bring my sister and herself out. It cost a lot of money and she didn’t make a lot. She used to make cakes, she worked in Penny Farthing in Dublin city centre. It was awkward for her to come out every week to see me.
‘She used to bring me bags of sweets and crisps when she came out so I felt great obviously. That was a pretty chaotic life for my mum as well.’
As he got older, McGrath began to question why his sister Okune — who passed way in 1994 from a blood disorder — lived with his mother while he didn’t. But it took many years before he came to understand the awful predicament his mother was in. ‘ I don’t think my grandfather would have accepted me coming on the scene, coming out to the house in Crumlin because he had Okune and I think it would have been too much for my mum to have brought me out as a baby too,’ he says. ‘That’s why my mum did the maneouvring, trying to appease my grandfather, whose name was Paul McGrath as well funnily enough.
‘ Then I went out there when I was 15 and I met him. I was brought up a Protestant and then I had to walk into the bedroom — because I slept in the same bedroom as my nan and granddad — and I had to kneel by the bed and bless myself, my mum taught me how. I had to pretend to be saying these prayers before I got into bed,’ he laughs. ‘Ah it was a strange situation. But we got through it and eventually I grew to love him. I already loved my granny Elizabeth but I grew to love Paul as well. It was just that we were from different eras.’ Betty’s passing was the second big loss Paul had this year, after Jack Charlton died in July. The former Republic of Ireland manager obviously had a big impact on his life on and off the pitch. ‘He was one of the most influential people that I’ve ever met, let alone had in my life,’ McGrath says simply. ‘ He had that many times when he could have said, “I’m going to cut this lad out of my team because he’s just going to bring us down”. ‘It wasn’t that I had a bad attitude, it was just that I used to get panic attacks and things. Even just meeting the team was an ordeal for me so I used to come over from England not too well anyway. I think he understood it after a while so he arranged for my physio to fly with me from Aston Villa and all, which is an awful thing to have to put on the Irish team. But I think he honestly understood that I wanted to play for Ireland and always be there.
‘He was very shrewd in knowing me. I think that’s why we had a really good connection.
‘Now I got a b******ing every so often so I wasn’t afraid of getting one if I didn’t do the right thing on the field.’
Though McGrath eventually formed a mutually compassionate bond with the big Geordie, he admits that when he first heard that Jack had got the Ireland job, he wasn’t hugely impressed.
‘I would have been one of those Irish people who thought, what?! Even though he won the World Cup and stuff like that,’ he admits. ‘I still would have thought, an Englishman coming over here to be manager of the Irish team? Hang on, wait! I don’t think that would be a great idea among a lot of the Irish supporters, let alone some of the players.
‘But then you meet the man and you just warm to him straight away. We had the first training session, it was in a gymnasium I think, and he started calling out these colours, like “puce” and colours I’d never heard of. You had to do squats and then jump in the air and it was the most ridiculous training session I’d ever had.
‘ But that was Jack. He j ust wanted to kind of shock you initially when he met you and you just kind of said, do you know something, this guy is just a big, big character and he’s just a laugh.
‘Obviously then as the couple of years went by, you grew to love him because he was so off the wall. But he could be really kind of the main
man when he wanted to be. He grew to love Ireland as well, which was half the battle.’
McGrath’s issues with alcohol were legendary in football circles and he has told stories of shinning down drainpipes to escape the virtual house arrest his teammates had put him under just to get his hands on a drink. But he says Jack, though he wanted to help, never blamed him for the spiral he found himself in. ‘There’s loads of times he could have just said goodbye to me,’ he says. ‘I was having a tough time and it wasn’t that well hidden. I was drinking a bit too much and I wasn’t feeling great about even playing football too much any more. He threw his arm around me a couple of times.
‘He never once... oh well actually he did once... I was on the bus, the Turkish game I think it was, when I couldn’t get off the bus because I really just didn’t feel like walking through crowds, I didn’t think I’d make it to the football pitch. That was the one time he did say to me, “Paul if you don’t come into the dressing room, I think it’s going to be the end of your career, with the Irish team anyway.”
‘Afterwards he came and apologised because I was sweating and I had withdrawals and stuff like that, and I think it hit him more than it hit me. I think he just thought, “Oh Jesus, this kid’s a mess”. But I never didn’t want to play for Ireland so I loved him for all the times he did take me back.
‘Jack really was a man’s man but my own experience, I saw a really lovely side of the man where he actually did care about me.
‘When we went to the World Cup [in Italy in 1990] he was walking my kids along the beach, digging up sand and paddling with them, he was a big softie really. He had to do that showy bit for people but he’d a huge heart.
‘He had soft side to him — it didn’t come out too often though!’
Even after their playing and managerial careers ended, the two spoke regularly and their friendship continued to blossom.
‘I’d always have kept in touch with him,’ says McGrath. ‘I have friends who would have been over with him and I always got the odd call from him just to make sure that I was doing ok, which was really lovely as well.
‘I knew when his health was going. We had a golf thing about two years ago and we all went to that and then there was a match in the Aviva that we went to as well. He wasn’t looking the greatest then so we all knew he wasn’t as well as he could have been. Tough times then...’ he trails off.
It’s hard to believe that the dizzy heights of Euro 88 and Italia 90 were more than 30 years ago, yet they still resonate so much with Irish people, many of whom are too young to remember the street parties, the growing expectation and the crazy homecomings.
McGrath believes that much of that outpouring of love stems from the camaraderie that was present among the team itself.
‘When we went to our first Euros, it was just so like a family atmosphere, a group of lads that genuinely loved each other, and loved going out, and loved Jack for letting us go out,’ he says.
‘It was all madness but Jack let us. Like, we were allowed go out for a drink the night before the Italian game in the World Cup. I mean, who does that? It’s madness.’
The Italia 90 trip also saw the team get an audience with the Pope — another of Jack’s ideas.
‘Whatever you say about us on the pitch sometimes, we used to think outside the box off the pitch,’ laughs McGrath. ‘I never dreamed I’d be walking up in a tracksuit in the middle of 8,000 people and I’d be sitting to the right of one of the people I regard as the greatest Pope we’ve ever had. It was just incredible. You think back and think, did that actually happen? Was I there? I was? It was a great time and I genuinely loved it.’
While McGrath at first questioned Jack’s suitability for the role of Ireland manager due to his English roots, he says he never questioned the Irish credentials of the many players around him who were born in England but declared their allegiance to the Republic on the pitch; players l i ke Andy Townsend, John Aldridge, David O’Leary and Phil Babb.
‘ Honestly, they had Ireland imprinted on their hearts and on their brains,’ he says. ‘They loved the fact that they were playing for Ireland. I don’t know what it is about the atmosphere in this country when you come here... you’d get mesmerised by it.’
Intriguingly, far from accepting every English player who qualified to play for Ireland, McGrath claims that there were players who wanted to get involved in the set-up but were turned down.
‘Certain people who were asking could they come over to play, they weren’t allowed,’ he says. ‘Because you have to have that connection. I don’t want to say the people who weren’t allowed but I don’t think they’d have fitted in very well.’
Though McGrath found himself fitting in very easily to the Ireland set-up, he didn’t find it quite so easy to avoid standing out as a mixed race child in Dublin in the 1960s and 70s. He says racism was something he suffered very often in his childhood.
‘Yeah I would have been called names but it would only have been from people who knew they were going to get a reaction from me,’ he says. ‘ You sometimes had to fight. It wasn’t something I liked, being called “gorilla” or other derogatory terms, they just called me whatever they wanted really, knowing it would be the signal that I was all in.
‘Whether I was going to take a beating or not, I’d go thumping and kicking and fighting. It wasn’t something that I’m proud of because words like that could spin you into fighting people at random. They knew that it would rile me to the extent that I would fight.’
Heartbreakingly, he often felt bad for the children who called him names if it resulted in him hitting them because of it. ‘ The people that I stood up to, I’d have a good go but I’d feel sorry for them sometimes,’ he says sadly. ‘If I managed to knock them over or give them a dig that would actually hurt, I was the one who walked away feeling, well why did you have to hurt someone? The one thing I didn’t want to be was a bully because I was bullied a little bit myself so I didn’t want to become a bully.’
Thankfully in later life, McGrath learned how to let his feet do the talking on the pitch and went on to have a hugely successful career, despite his many, many setbacks. As he looks on at how the game has evolved he has a feeling he wouldn’t be cut out for life as a footballer now.
‘Myself and Norman Whiteside at Manchester United, when we were both injured we were divils,’ he says of the striker who also had a reputation for enjoying a party. ‘Norman was a fantastic footballer, he was one of the best players I’ve ever played with. When he was fit he was strict, he wasn’t out boozing and stuff but we had such a laugh when we were injured.
‘You couldn’t have that life now being a footballer. It’s so strict. I don’t think I’d really like playing football in these times.’
He admits that, like most people, he’s ‘muddling through’ lockdown and missing his children and grandchildren, who all live in England. ‘They’re doing exactly what we’re doing, listening to the news, basically being told day to day what you’re allowed to do. Are you allowed to have a pint today, are you allowed to have your dinner tomorrow? No one seems to know.
‘Then you see what’s going on across the water with Trump and you think, which way is the world spinning. I always say to them, look, listen everything’s going to be ok in a while. Because there’s not a lot you can do. Just relax and enjoy your life.’
I ask him which match in his entire career would he like to replay, not to change the outcome but to just enjoy it. He doesn’t hesitate. ‘The Romanian game without the heat, if they could turn down the heat a bit,’ he laughs, referring to the game at Italia 90 that ended in a penalty shoot-out that Ireland won, putting us into the quarter-final of the World Cup.
‘The excitement that we created in Ireland, knowing that we were going to go on another step in this unbelievable thing that was happening to us. That’s a nice thing to remember.’
‘I loved Jack for all the times he took me back’ ‘We were allowed a drink the night before Italy game’
PAUL MCGRATH is an ambassador for the Repak Team Green initiative, which aims to educate people on how to recycle correctly. The public can join by visiting repak.ie/teamgreen and nominate someone to become one of Repak’s Team Green leaders