Long before they made it, the country's movers and shakers spent their teenage holidays eviscerating chickens, carrying glasses and picking mushrooms. Catherine Cleary and Róisín Ingle hear their stories
There is the Tánaiste who set tables one hot Chicago summer, the senior counsel who tended bar, the chief executive who fished straws out of empty cola bottles, and the fashion designer who had to wake one of her 11 flatmates out of his bed in the bath to have her shower every morning.
Mention summer jobs, and stories of tough work done in tougher times spill out, tinged with a certain nostalgia. Maybe it is a yearning for a simpler time, for that first step into the world and the freedom and independence of that first wage packet. Not one of the successful people would trade in the day jobs for the tedious and thankless things they did back then. But they are glad they did them. Along with an old friend one summer, I mastered an Allen key and assumed a knowledgeable air as a bicycle mechanic in the depths of the French Auvergne, teaching cycling tourists from Britain's home counties how to change gears and mend tyres. My training for the job involved a rudimentary apprenticeship that lasted approximately an afternoon. The clientele, who often knew more about gears than their "mechanic", peddled or wobbled off on gentle tours of tree-lined country roads while a van carried their luggage from hotel to hotel. When they returned, saddle-sore and sunburnt, it was my job to clean and fix up the bikes for the next day's arrivals. By the end of the season, a little light building work was thrown into the job description. When the woman who owned the operation mentioned a local tradition involving manure effluent being sprayed onto the new wall we were plastering, we made our excuses and left on a train for Barcelona to spend our oily earnings in clothes shops and cheap restaurants. To this day REM's Shiny Happy People, played by a French pop station that summer at least once every hour, brings back memories of puncture repair glue and croissants. Catherine Cleary
KATHRYN THOMAS
NOW: TV presenter
THEN: bag-packer
I packed bags in a supermarket in Carlow for two summers as a teenager and I absolutely loved it. I had a friend who also packed bags but her uniform didn't include a green dicky bow, which was a major draw as far as I was concerned. It was the classiest bag-packing job in town. Having been a bit of a rebel at school, when it came to this job I was the consummate professional. I worked out the most efficient way to pack the bags - which items should go at the bottom of the bag and which should go at the top. I would get very annoyed by people who didn't do it right. I was a bit of a packing perfectionist.
Given my dedication, it was no surprise that I was promoted to stacking shelves, where I introduced a new system without consulting the higher supermarket authorities. I stacked stuff according to my own preferences. I just felt things like meatballs should go on a higher shelf than, say, spaghetti hoops.
I loved the supermarket job because it was an excuse to chat to all the auld ones. Packing plastic bags is an almost dead art since the bag tax was introduced. Because I travel so much I tend to shop in small amounts, so bag-packing is not an issue. I usually just use one bag and put the rest of my stuff in my handbag.
PAT RABBITTE
NOW: Labour Party leader
THEN: factory worker, Chicago
For three summers I worked in Chicago in a factory where produce - they called it pro-duce - was loaded onto trucks bound for the big chain stores across the city. You worked about a 45-hour week and compared to jobs I'd had before it was great money. Before going to Chicago I had worked on the building sites for a summer in London. The wages I got in the factory were around five times what I earned on the sites, and the money I saved helped put me through college. There were no grants at the time, and the economic situation meant there was always a massive exodus to the US where many people, including me, had relatives.
The job was pretty unremarkable but for a politically interested student it was an extraordinary time to be in the US. It was memorable for me in that in the summer of 1968 I managed to get access to the Democratic Convention in Chicago. It was an anti-war convention, and every day dogs were set on the protesters who were calling for an end to the Vietnam War. It was a time of immense social turmoil, coming as it did on the back of the drive for civil rights and Martin Luther King's assassination. The student revolts had spread from Berkeley, California all the way across to the banks of the Corrib, where I went to college. So many students were politically active at the time.
It was a good job, in the factory, even if it was boring doing the same manual thing day in, day out. There was a strong trade union and I worked with plenty of Irish people. It was also memorable for the number of women we lusted after during those summers. Unsuccessfully, I might add.
MAURA QUINN
NOW: executive director of UNICEF
THEN: newsagent and waitress
I grew up in Roscommon and my dad arranged my first summer job with a local newsagent that has long since closed down. Everything was done with a smile and there were no terms and agreements. At 17 I was left in total charge of a very busy shop for 10 days. At the end of that they paid me the princely sum of £6. It was a very good lesson in agreeing things clearly before you start.
My first summer in college, one of my closest friends, who was born in the States, was working in the accounts department in Macy's in Manhattan. We shared an apartment in Queens and I got a job as a waitress. New York was our oyster. We had a wonderful time. It gave you a great sense of the world.
Another summer I had a great job working in Bewley's on Westmoreland Street. I had a bedsit on Harcourt Street and I could stumble out of bed at eight, hare down Grafton Street and be in work for 8.30am. One of the big benefits was you got fed. There would be a big fry and big mugs of milky coffee that I can still taste. There was a ghastly brown uniform with a cream or lemon trim which did nothing for you. You always hoped none of your friends would see you in it.
It sounds very old-fashioned but you did learn the value of money. I had my eye on a leather jacket in Switzers, and my mother said she would buy it but I had to pay her back. It took about five or six weeks.
DOMINI KEMP
NOW: Itsabagel entrepreneur
THEN: nightclub glass carrier
Working in Buck Whaley's nightclub on Leeson Street was my first job the summer after leaving school. I remember being told I would get paid 20 quid a night - 9pm to 5am - and just being thrilled because it was a huge amount of money.
As a 17-year-old school-leaver I was on the bottom of the rung. The cloakroom attendants were the next step up while the hostess jobs were the holy grail; they got to serve customers and look glamorous. I never got that far.
The main part of my job was carrying crates of glasses down from the kitchen to the bar area, which was fine at the beginning of the night when it was empty, but got more perilous as the night wore on. I soon learned that if you stamped on people's toes they would clear a path for you. Food-wise, we served cocktail sausages and chicken in a basket - if it wasn't fried it wasn't worth eating was the culinary mission statement. It was a time when five girls would come in with 50p between them and order a jug of orange juice and sit around it all night. Happy days.
MO KELLY
NOW: DJ and artist
THEN: TEFL teacher
For three summers in the mid-1990s I taught English to foreign students in the Dineen School of English in Portmarnock, Co Dublin. I did the TEFL course when I was 18 but never went abroad with it, I just taught in Dublin on holidays from college.
I really enjoyed teaching the students. I used to use a lot of different material to try and make classes more interesting. They loved anything about U2 or Kurt Cobain - if I did a lesson about Nirvana lyrics they'd freak out with excitement. I also used Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, which was good because the English is simple and it caught their imagination. I also used to make little movies and play them back to the whole school - anything to make them learn English. I remember one class of students I taught for this really intensive oral exam, they each had a specialist subject which they needed to be able to discuss fluently. Every one of them passed and they carried me out of the classroom in celebration. It was a real Dead Poets Society moment and I'll never forget it.
HELEN CODY
NOW: Fashion designer
THEN: coat-check girl
I was a coat-check girl in the original Copa Cabana nightclub in New York. It was a Hispanic haven of high kitsch in those days. Madonna had definitely left the building. The bridge and tunnel crowd would come in and disco all night wearing gold spandex shorts and lots of jewellery. I think the club is now the Nicole Farhi shop beside Barneys.
I used to waitress for private parties in the club and you had to wear a little black dress and hold a huge tray full of canapes over your head. I worked in a restaurant during the day on Madison Avenue and I'd sit chatting to the bouncers like Dolly Dimple, taking coats and people-watching.
I missed a drive-by shooting by one night. The night after I left to go and see my sister in the West Indies, one of the bouncers turned someone away and they came back and shot at him from a car. He survived. I think he was shot in the arm.
I was a student in NCAD at the time and my look was pure Puerto Rican prostitute, all pouty lips, a big mane of hair and these earrings I used to make myself (because I was an "ort" student) that looked like floor tiles.
We had a ball those summers in New York. I shared an apartment with 11 people. I used to get one guy out of the bath, where he slept, to wash in the mornings before I went to work. It was revolting.
Another job was in a restaurant on First Avenue. The French chef Philippe loathed Americans and because I was European he used to feed me. He would come out with a big puff of French cigarette smoke with pastries and food and ask me to taste sauces. I came back that year looking like a Tellytubby.
Along with two other friends we formed a band that summer called Five Cents a Dance. I suppose we modelled ourselves on Bananarama. We had dance routines and songs but we never got further than the apartment when it came to performing.
CONOR FAUGHNAN
NOW: Public Affairs manager, AA Ireland
THEN: chicken butcher
My first job was fitting tow bars to cars and I have to say I was quite appalling at it. Once I had to help fit a tow bar to the British ambassador's car and the armour plating caused us a few problems as I recall. It didn't help that we had security guards staring at us while we worked.
After that I had a summer job in Pat Grace's Famous Fried Chicken in Rathmines, Dublin. I had the fairly grotesque task of cutting up chickens with a circular saw. It wasn't pleasant, especially in hot weather. You had to cut the chicken into nine portions and be careful not to cut your own thumb off in the process. Separating the ribcage was the trickiest part. You had to finish each chicken in 40 seconds. I could probably still do it now. We got free food, which was a mixed blessing.
I also once had a job sweeping floors in the Carlsberg factory in Copenhagen. They had a very enlightened approach and used to give us free beer, which made me very popular with my flatmates. That was (probably) the best summer job in the world.
JOHN MAGUIRE
NOW: TV presenter
THEN: glass collector
My first job was helping the milkman every morning when I was probably only about nine or 10. I think it was to subsidise my meagre pocket money. I'd sit on the float, collect the money and got up at the crack of dawn to help. I was probably only paid about 10p for it, but I loved it. I also had a paper round delivering Southside (a Dublin freesheet).
Later on in life I was a glasses boy in the Royal Marine Hotel and I had a summer job in a DIY shop. But it was tough getting work some summers. I remember walking all the way from Sandycove and through Dún Laoghaire, calling into every shop on the way looking for work and getting nothing.
I do remember the jobs very fondly. It gave you a sense of independence and it was when I really started getting a record collection together. In those days I wasn't much of a saver; it was pretty much gone as soon as I got it. I do remember that buying U2's Under a Blood Red Sky felt like an achievement.
Now I sound like an old fart, and I'm only 33, but I think a lot of my generation would still have a respect for money learned back then when it was tougher to get. You notice it in families - the siblings who grew up in the 1980s are careful with money and the youngest don't remember tough times.
GERRY McCAUGHEY
NOW: Kingspan Century chief executive
THEN: painter
I graduated from UCD in 1985 and decided I was going to go and work in the States for six months. I started off in New York and then a friend invited me to visit California. I remember leaving Newark in snow in the middle of December and driving 100 miles from LA airport to Santa Barbara late at night. Next morning was a Saturday and they had a Christmas parade in 85-degree [30-degree Celsius] heat.
I decided there and then I was going to find some way of getting back to work in California. I tracked down two other guys from college and we rented an apartment in Torrance, Los Angeles. We were evicted the day after Patrick's Day in 1986. We had no credit, no green cards, nothing. So we bought some cheap suits and two of us went down to see an apartment and told them we'd just been transferred by an Irish company and didn't have credit references.
We got the apartment. They were very different times. Three cops lived in the complex in which we had an apartment with up to 15 illegal Irish guys.
I started working with a guy who had a painting company and then we set up our own business, Pacific Painters. Six months became four years and that painting company is still in business today.
Coming home was probably the hardest decision of my life. I got back in December 1989 and it always seemed to be raining. We set up Century Homes in the middle of a recession. I wasn't fully back in Ireland in my own head until a couple of years later. I was homesick for California.
MARY HARNEY
NOW: Tánaiste
THEN: mushroom picker
From the time I was 15, I worked picking mushrooms in a local factory in Rathcoole. When I finished school I went to Chicago, where I worked as a bus girl that first year. Being a bus girl involved setting and clearing the tables for the waitresses, so you were completely dependent on their generosity to share the tips. The following summer I was a waitress. In Ireland I worked in the PMPA accounts department.
We were in a glass shell in the middle of a large office. These were mainly jobs while I was studying in Trinity, during Christmas, Easter and summer breaks. I also worked in Fiat Ireland on the Naas Road, doing secretarial stuff in the human resources department. I'd done a typing and shorthand course in a college near The Irish Times. I was working in UDT Bank doing research on the clients, going through manual filing systems to see who was paying on time, when I got the call from Jack Lynch to serve in the Senate. That was August 1977.
These jobs were about having your own money but also I think they gave you a chance to decide what you wanted to do. I'm amazed at the number of teenagers who don't need to work now. In 1971 I came back from the US with £500 and that kept me for a year. Nowadays parents support their children much more. My favourite job was that first year I worked in the US. My father's family, with the exception of one brother, all emigrated to Chicago. I had a great time and they looked after me very well. I was just 18, probably a very young 18, looking back at the photographs.
MATT COOPER
NOW: Journalist and radio presenter
THEN: small publisher
During my last couple of summers in college I tried a couple of entrepreneurial jobs. Myself and a friend tried setting up a magazine in Cork and I certainly learned a lot about printers and the costs of publishing. The magazine was to be something along the lines of In Dublin and I remember trying to sell ads door to door around Cork. We never really got it off the ground.
We then had the idea of going into property development. The plan was to do up run-down cottages in west Cork but by then I'd been offered a college place in Dublin so that didn't happen. Before I got into college to study journalism I had to try to get as much media work as I could. I worked as a newsreader for a pirate radio station WBEN one summer. The station owner also had a weekly newspaper called Cork Tomorrow. Three editions came out, as I remember, before it collapsed. I did all the sports on the newspaper, and I remember the owner peeling out pound notes from a roll in his pocket when I refused to hand over my copy for the fourth edition until he paid me for the first three weeks.
PODGE AND RODGE
NOW: TV presenters
THEN: bingo hall bouncers
Technically our first summer job was down the abattoir just days after our fifth birthday. But it didn't last long - apparently children operating a bone saw was illegal at the time. Anyhow, Rodge got brucellosis and the pay was s***e. There's only so much liver you can eat.
We didn't work again for many a year, until a couple of jobs came up as bouncers at the Ballydung Bingo Hall. Now that was a job. We got to wear smart suits and look tough, which went down a storm with the ladies. Also, as the average age was 68, we were seen as toy boys and 'twas many the auld one who'd give us the nod after a night on the sherry and a couple of big wins. As soon as we heard "HOUSE!" from the hall, we knew our luck was in and the chance of a knee trembler around the back of the car park was on.
And the only bouncing we ever had to do was searching the ladies for stolen pens and keeping the rowdy ones down the back. Until the now-infamous Ballydung bingo card fraud scandal of 1969. There was a riot the likes of which hadn't been seen since the Rising, when Agnes Fudge, Betty Gee and Vera O'Flange all shouted "house" at the same time. The two of us were no match for the wrath of a hall full of angry housewives on HRT. There was nearly blood spilled that night and we were sacked soon afterwards. Especially when they found out it was us who had rigged the cards. We hung on to the suits, though, as we thought we might get summer jobs as Rose of Tralee escorts, but after 37 years of trying, we still haven't been accepted.
HUGH MOHAN
NOW: outgoing Bar Council chairman
THEN: construction worker
My father was a builder in Monaghan so when we were kids we worked on building sites with him. The pay was usually as much as he felt you deserved but it was quite good fun. When I was studying law in UCD I went to Chicago the first summer and did building jobs and landscaping work. Then there was a bar in London the following year. I did roofing work in New York one summer and it was incredibly hot. I'd do bartending jobs at night in a couple of Irish pubs around Manhattan and Queens, typical of summers when students worked in the States.
They were hot summers and you'd start at eight and work until six or seven. But I remember it as being wonderful fun. In the summer of 1981 I got a union job building an underground nuclear shelter in Chicago. Because it was a union job I was getting paid $400-$500 a week, which was a fortune.
I remember those jobs as being tough but very enjoyable. They certainly taught you how to work hard and back then you were so delighted to get a job. The fare to Chicago that first summer was £419 return. It's probably half that now.
DANUTA GREY
NOW: O2 chief executive
THEN: Coca-Cola quality controller
The year I left school I worked in a photo processing plant in Sheffield along with a friend from school. We saw pictures we definitely shouldn't have seen at that age. There was a guy whose job it was to do a quality check and watch the stream of photographs rolling out of the machine to check for colour balance.
To the ordinary eye you couldn't have discerned anything other than a stream of colour but he had an amazing ability to spot nudity at about 50 miles an hour and he'd stop the machine and gather everybody around. I think part of the fun he had was watching the reaction of us convent girls.
When I was at college I worked every summer at the Coca Cola bottling plant to subsidise my grant and get a bit of holiday money. I started off on day shifts and then got night work which was much better paid. You would go in at 9pm and finish at 7am, four nights a week. There were wonderful characters. You'd have the lads driving the forklifts who were always on for a bit of fun and the women talking about their families.
One of my jobs was watching bottles coming out off the cleaning plant and you'd have to check there were no straws stuck in them or other horrible things people used to stuff inside them. Because I was studying science I got promoted to quality controller and used to test the pH of the Coke. But at 3am or 4am you'd be watching bottles going by and it was all you could do to stay awake. I never drank it again. Ever.