Journalist Eamon Dunphy on infamous punk rock band The Sex Pistols

THE punk movement has been a great source of inspiration throughout my career and my life in general.

I left England in 1977 when my football career ended and I began working in journalism and it was around this time that I became interested in Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols. I wasn't a particularly big music fan but it was the attitude of punk which attracted me. They held up two fingers to the world, they made a joke of the system and the establishment and poked fun at the order of things. They just said bollox to it, basically.

I suppose you could say I was a 'fullyformed' person by that stage, I had given up football and was trying to start a new career and so the 'system' was the terrain I had to navigate across. There was something about their determination to debunk what was considered to be popular music around that time. They just criticised everything and they despised everyone.

They didn't feel they had to be nice.

John Lennon was another person I admired for similar reasons. He wasn't afraid to strike out on his own so he dumped the Beatles and forged a new path. It's the rebellious spirit that I admire. The courage to go against the tide, to speak out regardless of the cost to your own position.

I was a kid who started off in difficult circumstances. Like a lot of people who were poor in Dublin during the 1950s, I discovered that poverty is a learning curve all on its own. It's hard to be poor, not to have a job or an education and to feel as though no one in the world gives a damn about you . . . and it's especially hard when you realise that people who are supposed to care for you most, don't care either. In this regard, very little has changed . . . there are poor kids on the streets today and they don't exist, at least not in the eyes of the establishment. There are kids in doorways and we all walk by.

As a young man making my way in the world, the determination of the Sex Pistols and punk in general to reject the establishment, reassured me. That kind of attitude was also one of the characteristics which attracted me to Roy Keane; he is a loner and is willing to take the consequences. It's people who are prepared to break the mould and have the courage to make up their own mind who inspire me.

The Sex Pistols were a kind of manifestation of all these qualities that I admired and before them it was men like Bob Dylan and Muhammad Ali. I found these people to be heroic and they all influenced me greatly at different times.

For me, the Sex Pistols were not about music. They were about a new energy and they were invigorating, especially for someone like me who will inevitably take the opposing view. I hate clubs, even when I was a footballer I was never comfortable with the idea of a 'club'. That whole notion of 'clubmanship' and bonding and that we should all seek out common enemies, I was and still am totally against that.

When I began working in journalism I entered another type of club so the first thing I started doing was to attack other journalists. I criticised what they wrote and what they said and I suppose that urge to take the opposing view has always been strong within me. In fact, I think it gets Tworse as I get older. I have always been a keen reader and particularly when I was starting out, I wanted to read material that went against the grain. I respect nonconformists because singular thought is better and we are reminded of this whenever we rely on the committee.

It was the maverick streak of the Sex Pistols that I was attracted to most. I suppose I could cite the infamous ripping up of photographs of the queen and burning the Union Jack but it was about more than that to me. It marked a cultural shift and the emergence of a new voice. I found it all so refreshing and vibrant. Of course, there was the other side of their story . . . the tragic tale of Sid Vicious; he was charged with the murder of his girlfriend before dying of a heroin overdose at 21.

I suppose I found inspiration in the Sex Pistols because their message seemed real and honest. Unlike the popular music of the day, they weren't glammed up, as such.

They seemed more real, more honest in a world full of fakes. We still live in a world full of fakes, as William Shakespeare once wrote . . . "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players".