Martin was born in Castleblayney, County Monaghan in 1943 to James and Rose Feeney who ran a pub and grocers shop on Main Street. He was the eldest of 4 children. They were all delivered at home by Mrs McGlone who is also rumoured to have delivered Big Tom of Big Tom and The Mainliners. He had a happy childhood often spent helping his father in the shop or playing cowboys and Indians with his friends in the grounds of Hope Castle and Ronny Dignam’s yard.

Martin attended The Boys Own school in Castleblayney and was later a boarder at St McCartan’s College, Monaghan, where he excelled as an all-round academic. Considering he started to read the Irish broadsheets at age 4, this was unsurprising. Martin’s quest for knowledge became a lifelong passion; he was happiest when learning and read thousands of books throughout his life from the classics to Charles Fort’s Book of the Damned which profoundly influenced his outlook on life and interest in anomalous phenomena. He was a walking encyclopaedia.

In 1967, at the age of 23 he became the youngest councillor ever to be elected to sit on Castleblayney Town Council were he served until 1974. His modern views caused a little controversy to the say the least. He often made headlines in the local paper.

He met his late wife Arlene in 1974 and came to settle in Laurencetown where he raised four children. He worked as a wedding photographer and later a taxi driver in the Lurgan area.

To his family he was a devoted father and husband; intelligent, quiet, humble, unassuming and unfalteringly honest. A good man.

He once said he thought the perfect epitaph for a gravestone was Yeats’ ‘Cast a cold eye on life on death, horseman pass by”

He will be greatly missed by his children Ciara, Marty, Dionne and Neave, grandchildren Derwin, Ethan, Devyn and Zara. His brother Seamus, sisters Rose and Kathleen and all his nieces and nephews.