Peter McDonagh has, like the champion boxer he is, weathered a lot of battering one way and another, but you’d never think it to meet him. I did, to talk about his autobiography – Irish Blood & Grit – and was struck by his physical ease (like lots of boxers, he walks with a self-confident spring) and his openness. He’s not boxing now – he’s recovering from a near-fatal brain tumour – but his self-published book is at the top of the Amazon publishing charts. “I know a couple of influencers”, he says matter-of-factly. “I don’t like it, but that’s how things work nowadays; through social media.”
He’s had a rough life. His mother made the family move from an idyllic life in Connemara to Bermondsey when he was six; the young Peter got beaten up at school for being poor (his charity shop shoes were too big for him), Gaelic-speaking and Irish. This was the early eighties when Irishness wasn’t chic, and the IRA were attacking London, so “no wonder people didn’t like the Irish”. His mother was a violent alcoholic, beating both his father and his older sister (with an iron, once) before leaving her family for another man; his father tried to hang himself. “It was unusual back then for a woman to leave four children”, he says.
