Alan Martin
Getting the Job
'...my father was working for R A Burke it was, at the time and he was a fairly good checker so he just asked the bosses there would they take me on and they did as a casual and as far as the history goes my grandfather worked on the B and I and so did my father and uncle at one stage and then they moved into the Deep Sea end but that’s as far back as it goes which would be probably just pre-war, probably 1930s or that when grandfather started. It wouldn’t be as far back as some of the...other people who go back to the 1870s.'
Health & Safety
‘…there was one incident down with us where the health and safety people came down, this was later on and it was all containers at this stage and they noticed all the people driving around in cars so they told everyone, from now on, put it up on a big sign, they had to turn on their hazard lights so all the cars running around would have the hazard, that went on for around six months and one day didn’t the Garda car come down and noticed this and they blew their top. Went over and told everyone that it was not to be done, that it was causing more confusion and danger because obviously if the cars going along with the hazard lights flashing, you can’t tell if it’s going to turn left or right… The Gardaí said ‘nah you can’t be going along like that, it’s reckless’ … ‘health and safety says’ … ‘don’t mind health and safety, you’re on the road and we look after the road.’ So that stopped. Now there’s the kind of thing where the health and safety people had brought this in and it was, they just got this little idea into their head, you can see why, because there’s all these machines flying around and they said okay if the cars have flashing lights they’ll notice them more but at the same time every other car can’t tell or with the machinery for that matter which way the cars are going which defeats the purpose.’
Cargo
'…we were there one day and next minute we heard the story, “go over to the banana boat, they’re giving the bananas away… So we all rambled over and here’s all these bananas on the quayside and on the deck of the ship and everyone was just taking them and walking off. People even had got word out that people were bringing down little vans, so I grabbed a box, it’s all I could manage to carry because I’d no car at the time. And I said “What’s the story here?” and he said “Oh when they got to open them up they were all yellow… They won’t last. So I said, “what’s going to happen?” Oh he says, the ship is going back to the.... Jamaica or wherever it was, and on the way they’ll dump them all overboard”… sixty thousand boxes of bananas. But there were no use because by the time they’d get to the shops, being yellow, you know yourself once a banana goes yellow... Only a day or two and it gets dots on it… For some reason, maybe the refrigeration hadn’t been working on the ship…’