Richard O'Neill's Reading List

"They contacted me and asked me who I wanted to write about. I’m not a person who really has heroes, in the sense that my heroes will be everyday people. I was surrounded by inspirational people growing up, I am surrounded by inspirational people now. Celebrity heroes is not my thing. But there are two people that really resonated with me. One of them is a soldier called John Jack Cunningham, born in a wagon, who went on to get a Victoria Cross for bravery in the First World War. And there’s the first Romani professional footballer, born in 1869, called Rab Howell. I was fascinated by him. Football was not, back in the 1970s, a Romani game. I would wander up to a caravan site with a football under my arm, and people would look at me like I was an alien. Nobody wanted to play. My dad, God love him, would stand there and let me take shots at him, but he had no interest in it. I went to lots of different schools, and I found that football was a quick way of getting on with people. And I was good at it. As an adult, I have been lucky enough to work with professional footballers on the training side, on the motivational side. “Now is the right time” When you are passionate about something and you haven’t got anybody from your community who has a connection to it, you have a bit of a mountain to climb to find somewhere to play. If it’s actually against your culture, then you’ve got another hurdle to overcome. That’s what I wanted to show in the book with the main character, Lijah. He’s brilliant at football, but his family don’t want him to play. First of all, it’s ‘let him play, he’s just a kid, he’ll grow out of it.’ But when he doesn’t grow out of it, it becomes a problem. And he has a dilemma: do you follow what your family says—do you respect your dad and all those things, which you should do—or do you follow this passion? I think everybody can identify with that, child or adult, when there’s something that you get passionate about and people don’t want you to do it, but you can’t see anything wrong in it and it just drives you forwards. And I wanted to make a connection to Rab Howell as well. Yes, I didn’t want to sanitise that. I wanted to show it. I also wanted to show that the dad is not a bad man. He’s scared of what’s coming, and he’s trying to keep his life together. I wanted children to understand that adults often take the wrong decisions, maybe, but for what they think are the best reasons. Lijah’s dad isn’t perfect, but he doesn’t want this family to be split up and he can see it happening. I think a lot of people feel that from ethnic minority groups. At this point, we really need to have authentic books. We’re at that stage of the community where we have the people who can do it. Wee Bessie by David Pullar is great. That’s about his grandma so it is very authentic. Very often what is still happening—and it needs to stop, in my opinion—is that people use the iconography of Traveller, Romani, Gypsy. They’ll put a wagon on the front of a book, which has got nothing to do necessarily with the story, not realising that every one of those wagons was unique to a family, it very often told a story. How they were painted, and what was painted on them, actually represented that family. Some of them were burnt—it depended on the family—but often they were handed down. They are part of our culture, they are quite important to us. That’s something I’ve always wanted to do. I love animation, because it’s a great way of telling stories. I’m just starting work on the script for that. When you’ve got a producer on board and an amazing team who worked on the My Little Pony film, I’m thinking this is going to be good. I think these books, my books and Michelle’s books, will end up being translated into Welsh, and probably, down the line, into Spanish, wherever there are large groups of Romani people. That, for me, is one of the best things about writing: it has paved the way and created a really good path now for the next generation. I like doing what I’m doing, I’m so pleased with what’s happening now. What I would love to be able to do as I get older and older is sit there and say, ‘ah, there’s a new book come out from this Irish Traveller girl, there’s a new book come out from this Irish Traveller lad, there’s a new book coming out from this Romani person.’ And if one of them says, ‘I was inspired to write this because of Richard O’Neill,’ then I’ll frame that and put it on the wall. That’s what it’s about for me. It won’t be me that gets the awards, it won’t be me that writes the bestsellers, it will be the next generation. And I will be over the moon when that happens. It’s an amazing feeling, after all these years, to have these books in shops, to have these books out there, to be talking to people like you about these books. People say, ‘Do you not wish it had happened when you were younger?’ Absolutely not. The time is now, so we enjoy it now. We don’t look back for things like that or have any regret about ‘imagine if I had done this.’ In my community, my family, and in my philosophy, time is a circle. The past, the present and the future are all together at the same time. Now is the right time."