Belief and Blind Ambition

SENATOR Martin Conway stands in the lobby of the Old Ground Hotel. He wears a customary suit and holds a briefcase. In an hour he will board a train to Dublin to attend Seanad Éireann. He is just a few feet inside the door, watching it, waiting. He greets those walking in. “Typical politician”, some might say, “saluting everyone”. Martin has learned from experience that it is better to say hello to everyone than to snub a friend or supporter.

He is severely visually impaired and unless they cast a distinct silhouette or have a dominant distinguishing feature, the Ennistymon man finds it difficult to tell people apart. He admits there have been times he hasn’t recognised his own wife.

“One day I was waiting for Breege at JD’s Coffee Shop in Ennis. It was a beautiful sunny day and I was sitting outside. This lady came and sat down in the seat beside me and I said ‘God I’m sorry this seat is actually kept’. She turned around and said ‘it’s me Breege’, so it happens,” he says.

Martin has 16% vision. His vision gets worse in dim light or if he is tired. It is marginally better in bright areas.

“My wife often says she’d love to be able to get a pair of glasses to realise what I do see and what I don’t see. Sometimes she’s shocked at what I see and more times she’s shocked at what I don’t see. But I suppose, technically, I have 16% vision,” he outlines.

“The situation with my eyesight is that it can be quite deceiving because people see me out and about and they wouldn’t necessarily realise the extent of the difficulties. I was born with what they call congenital cataracts,” he says. The condition is genetic and his father and grandfather suffered from it too.

At six-months-old Martin was brought to London, where he had six surgeries to save his eyesight. He had further operations when he was three or four years of age, before his most recent surgeries in 2001-2002. Martin has clear memories of his time in the Mater Hospital in Dublin as a child.

“I vividly remember being very distressed when I was there on my own because, unfortunately, when you’re a child, the medical staff cover your eyes so you don’t go near them. I’ve an aunt living in Dublin who came in to see me every day and she just tells how heart-breaking it was for her to leave a child in that state but she had to. That was life. I spent a lot of time in hospital as a child,” he recalls.

As a child, Martin did not know he was any different. “I was probably about five when I was travelling to Dublin for an eye test, or just a consultation and, I suppose, children in their innocence would tell their parents, ‘I think I’d love to be a train driver’. My father, at that stage, told me ‘that’s one operation you won’t be doing’. And that was kind of, in a way, one of those memorable moments that you’d say, ‘well yeah, we’ve got a problem here’. I was a bit taken aback. It played on my mind. It had a certain recalibration effect on the way I thought,” he recalls.

Martin attended mainstream education in the CBS junior and senior schools in Ennistymon and went on to University College Dublin, before entering politics.

“I was different in a mainstream environment but for all its extra difficulties and extra challenges, it still created a fierce independent individual. If I had gone to a special school for the blind, I wouldn’t be convinced it would have worked any better… I was lucky as well in that I was an outgoing person with a lot of confidence and that I was bright. Sometimes my limited vision did create a problem but, by and large, I was bright enough to cope with integrated education. It is a testament to the teachers at the time that they took somebody on with a serious disability,” he asserts.

“School was challenging and it was difficult but it was defining and it moulded me as a person. It gave me empathy with people. It certainly gave me coping skills, surviving skills. It built an ambition in me that I was the same as anyone else. I had the ability to be as good, if not better, than a lot of them. I was as competitive as the best of them. The only place I wasn’t competitive was on the sports field. And that’s that, you know. I was very lucky. I do consider myself very lucky to have been able to complete my education in the CBS in Ennistymon. You know, that certainly was a positive.”

Martin’s educational progression highlights a changing technological landscape. “In the Junior Cert, or Inter Cert as it was then, I wrote it. I got an extra 10 minutes an hour. For my Leaving Cert, I typed it on a battery typewriter and I got an extra 10 minutes an hour. In university, I used a PC. So as I progressed, so did the technology,” he explains. Last year he became the first senator to view legislation in the Seanad on an iPad.

“In the last 20 years, the technology available has certainly eased the pressure on me as an individual. If this was 20 years ago or even 10 years ago, I would have to take the A3 double-sized legislation and battle away that way. Possibly, I wouldn’t have been performing as well as I am because I wouldn’t have been on top of my brief as well as I am. Now I can read the documents and I can read them comfortably. It certainly has made a huge difference and it has been the first time a member of the Oireachtas has accessed any of the legislation in the Chamber electronically. I think I must be setting the trend because I’ve seen others with iPads doing the same thing,” he outlines.

When he finished school, Martin visited a number of universities around the country to decide which one was best for him.

“I was either going to do law or politics. I didn’t get the points for law,” he says candidly, “so I did a BA degree in economics and politics, which was in UCD and I was lucky enough to get in there. I suppose going to college when I did, there were supports in place. I had a little dictaphone that I recorded lectures on and I got the handouts and overheads printed for me. There was a good support structure there and I have to say that I got a very good degree as a result. It was a great opportunity. That’s also where I became politically involved.”

After UCD Martin, still smitten with law, opted to pursue a diploma in the subject in what is now DIT. However, he says “events took over”.

At 25, he was put on the ticket to run in the 1999 local elections in the North Clare constituency. He didn’t win but the experience caused his confidence to grow. From overgrown hedges to over-zealous dogs, you are venturing into the unknown when canvassing door to door but Martin didn’t see it as a hurdle.

“I’m nearly as quick as everyone else. I have an innate sixth sense that if I nearly trip, somehow I don’t. Somehow I recalibrate. It’s more luck than anything else, I’d say. But when I was canvassing I had a small team of dedicated people that used to drive me and support what I was trying to do,” he recalls.

Martin was elected in 2004 and 2009. Coming from his home in Ennistymon, he had to attend a number of meetings in Ennis. He acknowledges it can be hard to ask for help doing things others take for granted.

“It can be hard but you know who you can ask and who you can’t. The great thing now is that people volunteer all the time. Even when I became a member of Clare County Council, the councillors were great. Outstanding, I have to say,” he claims. In particular, he acknowledges the help of Fianna Fáil councillor Richard Nagle and Independent councillor Martin Lafferty.

“If there was a meeting, one of them would pick me up. So I found myself in a position where work colleagues, although it’s a very competitive environment, Richard Nagle and Martin Lafferty gave me lifts all the time.

“I was never stuck either for a lift home from a meeting or, indeed, to a meeting. If there were public meetings on, Richard would say ‘well I’d be leaving at whatever time and I’ll pick you up on the way’. So I found that very reassuring and it was a great support to my wife,” he continues.

Martin doesn’t hide his ambition to take a seat in Dáil Éireann. He is open in his criticism of his party’s decision not to add his name to the ticket in the 2011 General Election. Last year he won a seat in the Seanad on the administrative panel and is now the Seanad Spokesperson on Disability and Equality.

“When I contested the Senate elections, I went around to the councillors and I told my story. Most of them would have known about my difficulties anyway. I think it was a credit to the Fine Gael councillors, who were effectively my peers at the time, that they voted for me in spite of the disability, on the basis that they knew I had the ability. So, effectively, ability won over disability in the end. And I got elected comfortably to the Seanad,” he says.

Working in Dublin is a challenge for Martin, who cannot drive because of his limited vision. It means he must plan meticulously to maintain his independence. He gets lifts into Ennis with people travelling from Ennistymon to work in the county town. “I have to have a mental note of the various different people in my area who are travelling to Ennis that I’m comfortable enough to ask for a lift,” he reveals. Then, if he is returning late, there are some people on night shift in Shannon who he texts to see if they are passing. If not, “usually a family member, would have to collect me, like my brother or my wife or someone like that”.

Martin is the first severely visually impaired person in living memory to be elected to either of the Houses of Oireachtas.

“Nobody has yet told me that there was another visually impaired person elected to the Irish Parliament. So that is a unique achievement in its own right. That is why I am interested in doing documentaries and speaking out and telling my story. I want to encourage young people with a disability, or even parents of children born with any kind of disability and tell them that with a bit of effort and determination and ambition, it can be overcome.”

Martin’s advice is simple: believe. “I believe in a society that has zero barriers. I believe that all of us have a responsibility to play a part in achieving that… There are a lot of people who are coping with various forms of disabilities, some declared, some not declared, who have been successful.

“It’s very important to believe in the ability of your children, not to let the disability to completely smother them, not to allow them to wallow in self-pity and for you as a parent to ensure you don’t create an environment where they are wallowing in self-pity,” he concludes.

Martin is the subject of a radio documentary, Blind Ambition, to be aired on RTÉ Radio 1 Saturday at 2pm. It will also be available on www.rte.ie/doconone.