An Appreciation

29 April 2007
 

Michael Morgan who died suddenly on the 27th April was a true original fighter, thinker and campaigner. A disability activist who touched lives and changed lives, a journalist who wrote for a number of community journals and papers including Disability Now, the Andersonstown News and Fortnight. 

He was a founder member of Euro-Ataxia, a European network which co-ordinates support and information for Ataxians.  Michael was also an active trade unionist writing progressive policy documents on disability for his union, the National Union of Journalists. Despite his degree of impairment he travelled widely in Europe, America and the Middle East. A keen photographer, he took a number of outstanding photographs which were recently shown at an exhibition in Belfast in December 2006 at the Arts & Disability Forum, an organization which he also helped found.  He lobbied hard for disability access to arts and arts venues and successfully campaigned for an all-Ireland award scheme for disabled artists, which has just recently celebrated ten years of productive operation.

Born in West Belfast on the 28th of January 1956 Michael was educated by Christian brothers at St Mary’s secondary school where he earned the nickname ‘Talleyrand’ after the disabled French Prime minister and political survivor. He attended a number of universities including Reading, Queens Belfast and also the University of Ulster at Jordanstown (or simply the ‘Poly’ as it was known at that time by the students). 

Graduating with First Class honours in Social Science in 1984, his thesis was on the origins and operation of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement. This directly challenged the established accounts (such as the British Governments’ Cameron Report) and later academic histories which took the foundation of the Northern Civil Rights Association as the beginning of Northern Ireland’s most recent political conflict. He showed that NICRA (which was founded in 1967) was preceded by a number of important community campaigns and civil actions against the Unionist authorities which had in fact begun as far back as 1963. 

When studying at Queens University Belfast he had hoped to take up a temporary lecture post as a way of beginning an academic career, but this was directly blocked by his professor on the grounds that the students would be ‘put off’ by his disability. From this time on he became involved in disability activism. When once asked why he chose to do this he simply replied, ‘I had no choice’. Arrested many times by the police and the Army for being drunken and disorderly he was simply not believed when he tried to explain that he had a genetic disorder which effected his ability to walk.  This meant also that he was frequently refused service in bars as he was thought to have already ‘had enough’ - he had ‘had enough’ but it was of this kind of treatment.  Not surprisingly, one of his very first successful Euro-Ataxia campaigns was to have a form of official ID that people with Ataxia could show when they were questioned by the police.

Michael had recently been reappointed editor of the Euro-Ataxia Newsletter to which he also contributed many articles and was responsible for it recently going on-line. Many fondly remember the good times they had at Euro-Ataxia events that Michael organized on which they formed long lasting friendships. On the evening of the 27th of April he had been finalizing his plans for a trip to a Disability Spa in Tenerife when he suffered a heart attack. He will be greatly missed by close friends and family in Belfast, his colleagues in the NUJ Disabled Members Council and by those who knew him in the arts and disability community, whom he recently joined on the streets of Belfast to protest at the government cuts in arts funding.