'What's someone drugged to their eyes going to do?'

"It's very simple, we want to go back to work but there's no way any one of us is going to drive off and leave his colleague. No way."

That's the bottom line. For the Brinks Allied workers picketing the company's headquarters at Clonshaugh, in Dublin, their reasoning is straightforward.

"Your colleague is being held up on the path and you're sitting on your arse and they expect you to drive away and just leave him there.

"What's someone drugged up to their eyes going to do? They're going to shoot him."

One worker, a man in his mid-twenties, recently faced a gang armed with shotguns and a machete.

He couldn't carry on in the job if he thought his colleague would abandon him to a hold-up.

"It was a sting operation, about four or five months ago, the cops knew about it, I didn't though. I was the guy out on the road and I can assure you if Pat had driven away, I wouldn't have been happy."

The gang of three armed men had stolen a taxi and were waiting outside a bank for the Brinks van . . . Three guys in a taxi, with balaclavas and sawn-off shotguns and a machete.

"As they approached me with the gun, the cops pounced on me, well I know now they were cops, they didn't identify themselves, but I was face down on the road at this stage.

"Then they had the lads on the ground, so I knew then they were guards.

"It was split seconds, but I was terrified, but if I'd seen the van driving away in all that, now, I don't know if I'd have gone back working after it."

Other men on the picket line, all with the company between four and eight years, have similar stories of close calls.

"There's no training. The man who's left standing on the path, they haven't given him any instructions what to do, just to the driver, to drive away. So what happens to you?"

The men say they've made their compromise, agreeing, under protest, to work with the new Dutch vans for the next month, however they say, it will be obvious fairly quickly how unsuitable they are.

"The new vans are more than 17 years old. The reg of the one behind us is 1987, that's what they're classing as a new van. They won't work over here, the doors are on the other side, there's a lot of security problems with them."

Workers say there's also a problem with the internal height which has been adjusted on later models.

"There are small low roofs on them, you'd be going around with a hump on your back like Quasimodo."

While there is room for further discussion on the vehicles, the Brinks Allied workers on the picket line are firm that abandoning a colleague, which they have been told is international practice, is not an issue they can back down on.

"We all have mortgages and car payments, a lot of the lads have families, kids going back to school in September, we need our jobs, but at the end of the day you couldn't do what they're asking us. That's what it comes down to."