TradeNames: Rose Doyle meets Christy Plunkett, a man who has filled his professional life with false teeth

When Christopher Simon Plunkett was 14 he left school and found himself a job. The year was 1952, work choices were thin on the ground and he was glad to become an indentured apprentice to Archibald Vinson, a dental surgeon who ran his own dental laboratory.

Christy Plunkett has been in the dental business ever since - though these days and for the last 30-odd years he's been running his own place, Simon Laboratories, manufacturers of dentures, crowns and chrome cobalt. The latter, to your and me, are metal dentures.

There's high precision sculpting and concentrated work going on all round as we talk, with a touch of the mediaeval about the instruments of the trade - sandblasting units, polishers, furnaces, even in the ultra-sonic cleaners and automatic mixers. He looks younger than his 66 years and tells the story of his working life with clarity and humour. Even tragedy, and there was tragedy, has a positive side in Christy Plunkett's telling.

"I'm in the business since I was a child," he begins. "I started work in October 1952. That was when secondary school fees had to be paid; my brother's were paid but, by the time it came to pay mine, my father was on strike. He worked for the City of Dublin Working Men's Club and the strike there became one of the longest running ever, ending in the High Court. He was out for 12 months. I went knocking on doors, literally, and ending up in this business was a pure accident."

Archibald Vinson's laboratory was in South William Street and the young Christy Plunkett lived in Whitehall. Until he was 23 he cycled across the city every morning, home for lunch, back again and home in the evenings.

"There wasn't a lot of traffic then," he says, "and we didn't put on weight in those days either. We burned off the fat."

He says he learned "a vast amount" from Archibald Vinson, that when the company closed he thought about taking it over but that "things were different in those days and it wasn't possible".

He did get married though, to Kathleen Coleman when he was 23. He worked for two different companies during the next five years and, after that, in the Dental Hospital in Lincoln Place, where he did the London City and Guild exams in practice and theory of dental laboratory work. By the time he'd finished these he and Kathleen were parents to two daughters, Lorraine and Caroline.

An admitted thirst for knowledge and learning has been a constant ever since. Over the years it has taken him to East Greenstead Hospital in the UK, on to Chicago, to Connecticut and further. He started Simon Laboratories in 1968. "I saw an opportunity to open a dental laboratory and set up in 15 Montague Street, off Harcourt Street. We were there 30 years until our landlord decided he wanted to redevelop the site and we had to move."

We digress into a short history of teeth, beginning with the Egyptians. "They developed what we call the lost wax casting technique," Christy explains, "an excellent system which gives great accuracy and precision. It was itself lost to us for about 1,800 years but came into use again in the 17th and 18th centuries when dental men of the time picked it up. It's still being refined today."

He reveals other odd and fascinating facts; how wooden pegs were used for teeth in the 18th century, as well as ivory, animal teeth and teeth from cadavers.

"In 1952, when I came to the business, we were still in the Vulcanite era for dentures," he says. "Vulcanite was a rubber which had to be processed. We went from there into the plastic. When I started, too, porcelain teeth accounted for about 90 per cent of all dentures. At present it's nearly all plastic teeth because plastic has been refined so well."

The digression takes him into a discussion of the value of porcelain for crowns and bridges (better for colour and strength in the mouth) to the excellence of the shade guide produced by Vita Lumin Vacuum - German made and used all over the world.

"It has 16 shades of teeth which cover practically every nationality in the world," he says, in tones of wonder, "or you can mix colours to make them exact."

Christy Plunkett's tragedy happened in 1973, the year of the Dublin bombings; the latter the reason he sees the hand of god in what happened to him.

By 1973 the laboratories had 13 employees and was doing well. Christy was part-time teaching in Kevin Street College of Technology and was a member of ANCO's Dental Advisory Board. Then it happened.

"A fire started with molten beeswax in the lab in Montague Street," he explains. "In my stupidity I tried to save the premises from going on fire. I would advise anybody now to get out when a fire starts. You can rebuild buildings but you can't rebuild people when they're dead." Christy Plunkett was rebuilt, but then he didn't die.

"I tried to shift the beeswax container," he says, "but it caught on the side of a bench and the whole thing fell over my head and hands. People tell me there was a scream that could be heard at the end of Stephen's Green. There was a dentist called Dr Andrew Woolfe standing behind me. He put my head and hands into water immediately. I ended up with a face mask of beeswax. I was taken to the Meath Hospital, and from there to Dr Steevens, both of them gone now)."

His face took six months to rebuild in Dr Steevens. "I was under the care of a man called Prenderville and was probably his worst nightmare because I knew a little about maxilofacial," Christy laughs, "which is the rebuilding of the face artificially. I look younger than I am because the rebuilding means I don't have the wrinkles I might have!"

And the hand of God? Christy Plunkett had arranged to meet his wife and daughters in Leinster Street the day of the bombings. "Because of my accident they weren't there," he says. "It probably saved their lives."

After the accident, he says with a degree of understatement, that he probably wasn't "mentally attuned" to changes in the world of the dental laboratory. "In time we went back to having just four people working in the business," he says. "We're still four today and quite comfortable with that."

The company moved to its present premises, at 6 Oxmantown Lane, Blackhall Place, Dublin 7, three-and-a-half years ago. The company employees are all dental technicians; his daughter Caroline Redmond, ("who runs me and the company!"), his nephew Paul Coleman, who does most of the metal casting, and Sean Gallagher, whose expertise comes from almost 17 years spent working in Germany.

Christy says that, nowadays, "if you've got money you can get anything done with your mouth! For €30,000 you could get your whole mouth reconstructed. The full upper and lower dental market still exists but is decreasing. People are looking after their natural teeth a lot better and going for crowns and bridges and etc."

Simon Laboratories has recently overhauled its accounts system and, after 30 years using the Kalamazoo System, has just installed a computer accounts package.

Christy Plunkett says he's supposed to be retired and is going to cut back on work, a bit. He intends playing more golf. He will also continue with the prayer guidance work he's been doing for years in All Hallows and with the course in Bereavement Counselling he's already started. "People are too busy to listen to the bereaved anymore," he says. He intends listening.