Unless you inherited a farm or got a job in a bank, you were emigrating. Brendan Tuohy (57) reflects on his youthful passage from education to broken economy in the 1980s, a path that would take him to England and then into the taxi game back home.
“The eighties were disastrous. You just couldn’t get a job filling petrol,” he says. “The notion that there was work in the economy ... I still haven’t lost my fear of unemployment after all these years.”
In 1992, when London construction faltered, Tuohy invested in a taxi plate in Ennis, Co Clare. They were changing hands for eye-watering amounts of cash. His cost £28,000.
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“I got eight good years out of it. You weren’t getting rich but there was a good living. In the latter years Ennis had the dearest taxi plates in the country — one guy eventually paid £118,000 pounds. He got a year out of it [before] it got deregulated” in 2000.
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Tuohy worked long hours in those early years, almost exclusively at night where the money was. His first car was a 1990 Mazda 626. It had a fob to unlock the doors, “space age” technology, he remembers.
But he was on to what was coming. He saw the Progressive Democrats, then in Coalition, as an Irish version of the Thatcherism he watched unfold during his days in London. “It was obvious they were going to deregulate somebody.”
The effects, when they came, were that many drivers went part-time, some surviving on school runs and odd jobs. Eventually many of the post-deregulation drivers were “washed back out” because of the lack a decent living.
“It wasn’t [about losing the value of] the plate really, it was the job. You lost your money but you also lost your job on top of it, that’s the part that killed you,” he says, of the sudden drop in income as more and more cars swelled the town’s ranks.
Once steady at about 20, he remembers the numbers in the area going to as many as 140. The double blow to investment and income took its toll on the health of colleagues.
In his time, Tuohy bought the first mobile phone in Ennis and ran a co-op with 40 cars. Such things are obsolete now — direct calls and two-way radios long replaced by smartphone apps. Cabs at the touch of a button.
Tuohy plans to keep driving around Ennis, in a business he has watched change dramatically over three decades, but he has other business interests. A new generation of drivers, he says, will need something more to entice them.
