At the meeting of the British-Irish Inter-Parliamentary Body (BIIPB) in Bournemouth early this week, FG's Austin Currie and the Irish ambassador to the UK, Daith∅ ╙ Ceallaigh, had a lot to talk about. They both worked as bus conductors in the town in the 1960s.
Currie was a student at Queen's and ╙ Ceallaigh at UCD and they were among the hundreds of Irish earning their fees over the summer holidays.
╙ Ceallaigh told Quidnunc that he and Currie did two full days' work six days a week, and a single on the 7th, because they needed the shonking - the local word for overtime.
They were paid £41, wore uniforms, learned to call everyone "mush" and lived in digs where, says the ambassador, he and his brother had two repeater alarms placed in an enamel bucket in their bedroom to wake them up, so great was their tiredness. Currie organised the bus workers into a union.
Currie and ╙ Ceallaigh have come up in the world and were dining with Lord Montague of Beaulieu in his National Motor Museum on Monday night, surrounded by vintage cars and in front of a red No 51 bus to London Bridge Station. Other guests from the BIIPB included the British ambassador to Dublin, Sir Ivor Roberts and the joint chairmen of the inter-parliamentary body, Michael O'Kennedy TD and David Winnick MP. Montague said his father had steered the bill through the Commons that allowed motor racing and his grandfather had put it through the Lords. British Racing Green, the national racecar colour, he said, was in honour of the shamrock because motor racing was first allowed in Ireland.
In 2003 he intends to take one of the cars back to the Athy circuit, where it raced 100 years ago.
Then O'Kennedy brought the gathering back to reality by telling them that fellow member Jimmy Deenihan wasn't a clippie, like the above pair, but was actually driving a bus while he, O'Kennedy, was plucking peas off a pea-line in Smeldleys of Spalding.
rholohan@irish-times.ie