TradeNames: A 90-year-old Limerick company has returned to its storage roots after years in logistics, writes Rose Doyle

Some companies, in the bid for survival, abandon their beginnings and venture anew. Limerick Self Storage Ltd is having none of that: four generations and more than 90 years since it was first set up the company has come full circle and become a very 21st century, technological version of William Hickey's original Limerick Carting Company.

The years between have seen tireless movement and much innovation, long hours worked, risks taken but never a complete moving away from what they were. Through it all, Hickey family commitment has always been a given, and still is. David Hickey, for the fourth generation, runs things these days and is the one who has made the changes that will see the company move with techie ease into its centenary year in 2015.

David it is who tells the story, abetted by his father Derek who, retired now, combines wisdom with common sense when he says he was glad to hand over, firmly believing, "the older generation should give the younger its head, let them bring things on. I didn't want to hold David back, so I let him at it! There's also the fact that younger people, the people David deals with in business, are more comfortable dealing with someone their own age than with someone in their 60s, or older."

David tells how his great-grandfather's company, Limerick Carting Company, operated in 1915. "They basically took stuff off the trains when they arrived into Colbert Station: everything from coffins to grain, all of which they delivered around Limerick city and suburbs. And they stored things for people. In the beginning they used horses and carts, hence the name, but after a while moved to using small trucks."

All goods movement between Dublin and Limerick, in those early 20th century years, was by rail. Derek Hickey says a great deal of his grandfather William's business involved delivering to the big stores - to Roches, Todds (now Brown Thomas) and Cannocks. Jacobs Biscuits used to come down in skips, which were 20ft containers filled with aluminium tins.

He remembers his grandfather, William Hickey, as a tall man, "well built and always immaculately dressed. He was involved in politics, though never succeeded in becoming a local counsellor. I was quite young when he died. My father, Paddy Hickey, went into the business and brought on the motored transport aspect. When he joined we started to do more national haulage. C & C, Schweppes and Watneys Red Barrell were all big customers. We had the agency for distributing Watneys over three-and-a-half counties: Limerick, Tipperary, Clare and north Kerry."

Derek's father, Paddy, came to the business, David says, in about 1926.

"He was the one who bought the warehouse in Parkway, Dublin Road and operated there until the 1970s when he bought another warehouse on Tipperary Road. My dad, Derek, came into the business in 1963, and went on building it up. My grandfather, Paddy, had two daughters too, Mary and Joy, and another son, Michael, who was in the business for a while until becoming a professional tennis player took him out of it."

There's something of a sporting tradition in the family. Paddy Hickey won a rugby Junior Cup medal in 1931. His son, Derek, won the same medal 30 years later in 1961 and, three decades later in 1991, David Hickey won the award.

In 1973 the company changed its name to Hickey Group Ltd.

"We felt the name Limerick Carting Company was a little parochial by that time," Derek says. "We were doing national haulage and were afraid Dublin companies might not ring us with business! It made a difference. We covered the 32 counties."

He did some of the driving himself, on roads far from ideal.

"One day," he remembers, "on the way to Dublin, on the road between Limerick and Roscrea, I pulled up and saw the tires covered in mud. They were inclined, those days, to let traffic do the compacting on the roads after they were built!"

Warehousing, David explains, "Is quite a simple business. A few years after moving to trucks the company was employing 15 people. At its peak the Hickey Group had about 50 people employed and had facilities in both Limerick and Dublin. The company had also grown to a fleet of 35 trucks. When Ronald Reagan visited Shannon we were the official transporter, taking all the food and equipment on and off Airforce One.

"We've stored everything from penny jellies, when there was a sweet factory in Limerick, to Russian helicopters! The first warehouse was 10,000sq ft and the second on the Tipperary Road 36,000sq ft. My Dad really brought the company to what it is. He moved into property development and the company business became warehousing and logistics which involved the transporting, picking up and handling of products."

Derek Hickey remembers how, during a CIÉ strike in the late 1970s, "a customer asked us to transport a load of margarine to a wholesaler in town. Our trucks weren't refrigerated then and, by the time I'd got to the other side of the city, there wasn't much left of the margarine! There was hard work and long hours in the 1970s. The business is completely different now to how it was when I was running it."

In the 1990s they cut back and, with David on board (his brother Peter lives in Puerto Rica and sister Elaine works as a civil engineer) the company went into archival and data storage management. David Hickey, seven years in the business now and with a degree in business and marketing from TCD, as well as a period in the US with an Irish software company behind him, is wildly enthusiastic about the fledgling, already soaring, Limerick Self Storage Ltd.

He'd seen and explored the self storage concept when he was in the US and in 2001 brought the company right back to its roots when he went fully into that side of the business. In 2004 the Hickey Group was closed down and the Self Storage side of the business, with David and three staff members, began its forge ahead. "Ours is the most modern in the country," he says, "and allows for self storage of everything from furniture to files, accounts, the tools of their trade for plumbers and carpenters who need to keep things in a safe place. To look at, they're warehouses with separate rooms, all of different sizes. We've two facilities, one on the Tipperary Road over two floors which measures 26,000sq ft and a new 40,000sq ft one on Dock Road in the Docklands Business Park with three floors. We've a website too, www.limerickselfstorage.com."

Everything, David explains, is "completely automated. Each room is individually alarmed, has CCTV cameras outside and internally, rooms heated to necessary temperature and fire and security alarms monitored 24/7. Customers have access to their goods 24/7 too."

He's spokesperson for the 20-member Irish Self-Storage Association, which has 25 facilities around Ireland. It's an area of business which is growing, he says, "because people move house more often, have more material goods and need space to store between moves. Also, buying property and renting warehouse storage is very expensive so, with a company like ours, you can have storage anywhere in Ireland, from 25sq ft to 2,000sq ft for as short a period as a month."

Derek has not the slightest regret about his retirement from the company. With his wife, Aileen, he's enjoying life in Portugal these days.

"I have done my 40 years with the company," he says. "The young are the risk-takers like we were 30 or 40 years ago. You have to let them at it."