It was Eamon Langton who drove me out of town all those years ago.
I gave my mother a last hug at the front door and put the suitcase she had packed into the boot of Eamon’s car and headed off to make my fortune in the world.
Eamon was a busy man, even then, and our journey involved a stop off in Tramore, for some reason that I can’t remember, but we eventually arrived outside my new lodgings in Dorset Street late at night. I checked into the digs from hell and got ready for my first day in my new job with Aer Lingus, out at Dublin Airport.
I reported to the personnel department the following morning and after a few phone calls they found somewhere that required the talents of the new recruit just up from the country.
I was brought down through the hangar area and got my first close up view of an aeroplane. I was deposited in a large office over the hangars and there I was to remain, the proverbial round peg in a square hole. For almost 19 years. I got familiar with the technical end of running an airline, not something that had ever interested me very much as a child.
In the early years I was part of the maintenance and engineering department and later this became known as TEAM Aer Lingus. Business boomed throughout the seventies and eighties with customers from all over the globe sending their aircraft to Dublin for maintenance. New hangars and facilities were built on, but I realised that the wonderful works of the aeroplane were not what I wanted to spend the rest of my life observing, so I packed it in in 1988 and we returned to Kilkenny and the pub life. The old saying, “Out of the frying pan and into the fire” comes to mind.
I’ve kept in touch with former colleagues over the years and always take an interest in the goings on at Aer Lingus. It came as a shock to read that the whole operation, now called SR Technics, is to close with the loss of 1,200 jobs. The writing was on the wall when Aer Lingus decided to send its business elsewhere, but it’s still hard to believe that the whole operation is about to close down.
We’re about to be hit with a series of strikes and protests from the public sector unions over having to take a seven per cent cut in pay. Seven per cent cut or the dole, which would you prefer? I know of 1,200 workers who would jump at the former.
Where’s our money?
I’ve an account with Permanent TSB. Little did I, or the staff working there, know that the executives further up the line were playing some sort of Monopoly with our cash. They’ve admitted to transferring seven billion over to their buddies in Anglo Irish for 24 hours to make their balance sheet look good.
If I’m right seven billion is 7,000,000,000 in figures. Now I’m not a trained accountant or lawyer, but here are a few simple sums I’ve done with a €10 calculator.
Let’s assume you would get five per cent interest on a sum as large as that. My calculations show me that’s €958,904 per day, or we can just call it an even million to simplify things. This means that whoever transferred the money out of Permanent TSB for a day cost that company a million in lost interest.
Someone or some people have robbed the bank of a wad of cash that would get an ordinary decent criminal 20 years in jail. Where are the handcuffs?
Gillian Bowler in handcuffs. Hmm, now there’s a thought.
Things we can do without part two
Oh the excitement of it! The day our first black and white television arrived in the house, complete with the little rental book that was brought over to Lewis’s for payment every week.
Then the colour sets arrived, the rental system disappeared and we all discovered hire purchase instead. Every couple of years the ads would tell you it was time to change to the latest super duper model and finally you were a dinosaur if you didn’t have a flat screen in the corner and maybe two or three others scattered around the house.
It hasn’t ended there, though. That “best picture ever” isn’t quite that. You now need high definition and another addition to the viewing bill.
My advice is you don’t need it. I’ve looked at demonstrations of HD TV and, to be honest, I can’t spot the difference. Just clean the dust off your normal screen once a week for that “HD effect”, without the extra cost.
