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| Title |
Bombs and disruptions in the 1970s. |
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| Description |
John Regan: At that period there was a bomb, I think I told you this before, at the back of Mulhearn’s in Belmore Street. It was at Joe Aiken's garage. I think I might have talked about this at the beginning.
Interviewer: Possibly
John Regan: And it shifted our machinery in the store, y'know, pulled out steam pipes, water pipes and all that, and it was, we were out of, we stopped bottling for three months. It also wrecked our mineral water factory and the office inside and therefore we couldn’t, we had to stop manufacturing minerals. We stopped bottling and, in the meantime, I negotiated a contract with Guinness that they would supply us with bottled Guinness during the interim period while we were trying to get back on our feet. And they bottled it, y’know? They put on our crowns and labels and to the general public it would appear that it was still bottled by Mulhearns, but that's how we did it. Now I had to lay off men, y’know, all the men during that time and all we had were maybe lorry men distributing and we merely, then, became distributors, not bottlers. And I think the fact that the bomb came at that time it triggered off a new line of thinking. And therefore we had the opportunity of, y’know, looking at buying directly in bulk from Guinness. Now we did get back to bottling again in March of '74, I think, and then the Ulster Workers Strike came along, y'know, in July, I think, of that year and it meant that we couldn't get the stuff in on time. Even when we had the tanks, arrived outside, y’know, to pump into our storage tank, the electricity wasn't there to do it, y'know, and we had men at that time maybe living out at Springfield or y'know, maybe three or four miles out of town that missed their lifts home, y'know, keeping them on. You didn't have it in the morning, you'd men standing around, and then when it came in you started and then maybe the light went out, y’know? The whole thing was chaotic, y’know? We got a sickener of it, y'know? Therefore we stopped bottling.
Ref: 91-24-108.
Interviewer: Sandra Matchett, Fermanagh County Museum.
© Fermanagh County Museum. |
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| Speaker |
John Regan |
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| Sound |
91-24-108.mp3
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