CLANDESTINE RENDEZVOUS

Dear Editor,

One of the great pleasures of coming home after more than forty years spent earning a living in the UK is to be able to follow at first hand Cork’s fortunes in the All-Ireland hurling and football championships.

In 1954, I was at Croke Park with my aunt May to see the Rebels beat Wexford in one of the great All-Ireland classics. Twelve years after that Cork victory, I was working in Coventry as a telephone engineer. In that intervening period Cork had not managed to win another All-Ireland hurling title.

But, as convention has it, they were back in Croke Park again on the first Sunday in September this time matched against their arch-rivals, Kilkenny. Cork were not expected to win.

I was sitting in my car in the street outside my house trying to listen to the shrill commentary of Micheal O Hehir as it wafted and waned through the car radio. In those days car radios were often the only way to pick up broadcasts from Radio Eireann.

There was a certain symbiosis in knowing that all over Coventry and the rest of Britain immigrants from Kilkenny and Cork were doing the same. Against the odds and the predictions of the sporting pundits, a young and untried Cork team beat their old rivals and sent every Cork supporter delirious with joy. The long wait was finally over.

For Don Ahearne, a telephone engineer work colleague and a fellow Corkman, and me the result was ecstatically overwhelming. When we met the following morning at the depot where we reported for work and where our vans were garaged, our handshakes, embraces and shouts of Cork’s traditional war-cry “up the Rebels,” drew grudging congratulations from our Irish work mates and dismissive bewilderment from everyone else.

Three days later, the Cork Examiner (as it was then), ordered from home, came thudding through the letterbox with the report of Sunday’s triumph emblazoned across its sports pages.

As it happened, Don was operating from a different depot on the Thursday morning so I arranged to meet him at a mutually convenient cafe where I could hand over my copy of the paper for him to enjoy.

It was a simple plan for the sharing of a simple pleasure. Or so we imagined. We were both telephone installers and the accepted practice among all the crews was to leave the depot early each morning, stop off at a cafe and treat ourselves to a tea and fried rasher sandwich breakfast before starting the day’s installation assignments.

Not too surprisingly, this type of unofficial meal break was something frowned upon by Post Office telephone management and offenders caught between cup and lip were subject to severe disciplinary measures including dismissal.

Quite unknown to Don and I, far from home and sharing the unexpected triumph of our native county, a woman living across the street from the cafe reported our clandestine breakfast rendezvous to the telecoms office.

Clearly, she regarded two of Her Majesty’s telephone vans standing innocently outside her livingroom window an affront to her patriotism and to her view.

Don and I were marched in to face our managerial inquisitor the following morning to explain why we were sitting in a cafe at a time when we should have been climbing up the side of the house of some potential telephone subscriber connecting its occupants to the outside world.

We arrived for our ordeal well prepared and rehearsed and, because of Don’s rather volatile temperament, I insisted on doing all the talking. Don complied with this course of action a little too readily, I thought at the time. No doubt he had estimated that the person with most to say was likely to have most to lose.

Fortunately for his sake and for mine he was wrong. I related in heart-rending terms the exceptional circumstances that had compelled two of the most dedicated and loyal employees to cross paths so fleetingly so that I could pass on to my Cork colleague the newspaper and its account of the game.

At this stage of the proceedings, the Examiner was produced as irrefutable proof of our honest intentions. This newspaper, I explained, would not have been available to him anywhere else north of Watford Gap. And we were only in possession of it now because of the kindness of my mother in posting it to me. We rested our case.

His look of knowing scepticism spoke volumes but it also betrayed the merest hint of wry compassion. He reprieved us both with a dire warning as to our future conduct and imposed a total exclusion zone around the cafe and its environs.

The cafe owner was disappointed but we were happy to bide our time before finding a more secluded location where we could enjoy breakfast camaraderie before starting out on the labours of the day.

Yours sincerely,
Nick Nolan,
Ballinalacken,
Ballylanders,
Co. Limerick.

I.M.F. - INTENSE MISERY FOR FAMILIES

Dear Editor,

If anyone thinks that the IMF (International Monetary Fund) is an independent voice in this financial crisis, they are either living in dreamland or are themselves an interested and thereby discredited party.

The IMF is funded by member governments and by interest from debtor country loans, and as such stands at the head of the financial system which got us into this mess. To suggest otherwise is to maintain that the DPP and the gardai are not party to the legal system of Ireland.

Its very raison-d’etre is to compell ‘Sean citizen’ to pay for the financial (and political) woes of their wayward government. It is in all but name The Intense Misery for Families (Agency).

This crisis was created largely by wayward banks and a wayward financial regulatory system of which the IMF (and the ECB) is a key and kingpin part. It would never suggest that member countries allow their banks to fail or default on debts to bondholders.

No, the IMF stands at the head of a financial system which supports bondholders to the detriment of ‘Sean citizen’. Its very existence would be threatened if it did otherwise. Failing banks and defaulting to bondholders (who took the risk in lending large sums knowingly to wayward banks) would be an anathema to the IMF.

NAMA is nothing less than this Government’s (who allowed us get into this mess in the first place) way of transferring bank and bank holders debt onto the bank of ‘Sean citizen’, robbing his piggy bank and robbing him of his dignity and even his survival or his life in some instances, and must be rejected if necessary by force of mass demonstration.

Others and I are truly surprised that this has not happened to date. Yes, people are afraid, but there is another way. In this you must distinguish between government debt and bank debt. The first you cannot and must not default on, the second is like any corporate debt, we can and now we must compel the banks to default on it.

Let the existing bad banks fail and instead let a new government put our money into new good banks to lend to hard pressed businesses so we can trade our way out of this ungodly mess not of ‘Sean citizen’s’ creation and let the IMF or ‘The Intense Misery for Families’ look to international bondholders who took the risk in lending large sums knowingly to wayward banks to take the pain.

Yours sincerely,
Kevin T Finn,
Kings Square,
Mitchelstown.

BELLS TOLL FOR JOBS

Dear Editor,

One would have thought that the growing number of jobless workers would have rang restraint bells amongst the trade union hierarchy.

Power corrupts, especially the power to withdraw labour, bringing operations to a standstill, irrespective of whom they inconvenience.

This power gives them the impression that rather than bargain in a fair sensible manner, they can bulldoze employers into submitting to their demands, which in doing so they may become less competitive and lose business and the likes of David Begg and Jack O’Connor and now Eamon Devoy have become Ireland’s top exporters, sadly of jobs and personnel.

Every worker is entitled to be a member of a trade union and is expected to abide by the rules and regulations of both employer and trade union. Those rules require careful scrutiny because in my opinion the intended widespread electricians strike as ordered by Eamon Devoy is going to cause hardship to innocent people, traders and companies who have no connection with any aspect of his alleged grievance.

If an isolated factory making carpets or pottery etc is strike bound, all work at a standstill and pickets at its gates, the only people affected are in that particular company and life goes on as normal elsewhere.

Mr Devoy’s threatened strike is going to cause widespread hardship, which is illegal. Remember Shylock in the Merchant of Venice. He could take his pound of flesh and could not spill one drop of blood.

Mr Devoy and his cronies will have to compensate all the people unconnected to his grievance who suffer losses from his actions.

Thank you,
Richard Prendergast,
Mondaniel,
Rathcormac,
Co Cork.