A New LifeFor former bus driver Peter Bunting, becoming a trade union official was one of the most exciting challenges of his life, he tells Sylvia Thompson
If you were a regular commuter on the Dublin city 16 or 31 bus routes running north to Summerhill and Howth in the 1980s, you may have shared a few pleasantries with bus driver Peter Bunting. And if you were attending lectures in business, economics, sociology and politics at Trinity College Dublin in the late 1980s and early 1990s, you would also have been familiar with this mature student who was known to interrupt lectures and question established views while studying for his honours degree in business and economics, working full-time for CIÉ, raising a young family and being involved in the National Bus and Rail Union (NBRU).
Returning to college as a mature student is a big challenge for many people, but chatting about his working life now as assistant general secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions with senior responsibility for Northern Ireland, Bunting (54) comes across as someone who thrives on challenges.
"Northern Ireland is economically a number of years behind the Republic in terms of unemployment, attracting inward investment and tourism. It is still very much a divided society and my function is to raise the profile of the trade union movement and promote solidarity, particularly among the working class.
"We have created a neutral workplace, the next step is to create a shared, more tolerant workplace which accepts difference and diversity," Bunting explains.
The reintegration of prisoners into society, anti-racism initiatives and supporting the Patten police reform are all issues on his agenda.
In some ways, Bunting has come full circle. He grew up in Belfast's Lower Falls Road area (his dad, also Peter, was Independent Labour Party councillor and active trade unionist), moved to Dublin in the 1960s with intentions of becoming a Christian Brother and went back to Belfast where he briefly got involved in local politics and the civil rights movement. He returned to Dublin in the early 1970s, where he has lived ever since and commutes to Belfast to work two or three days a week.
Married in 1972, Bunting says he joined CIÉ "to get his driver's licence". Starting off as a conductor, Bunting later began driving buses, all the while fighting for better conditions and wages for his fellow workers.
"It was a very difficult time for industrial relations. There were many strikes, one of which lasted for 10 weeks in 1974 - we ran out of strike pay after four weeks. After that particular strike, we went back to work a six-day week, unofficially went on strike again for three days and got a 5.4 day week, which \ necessitated us working seven days in a row and never having a long weekend."
In retrospect, Bunting says that many of the strikes in the 1970s were a waste of energy, caused by inter-union rivalry and tensions.
Meanwhile, he and his wife, Nuala, had made a commitment to pursue third-level education once their three children, Dara, Emmet and Muireann, were "at a reasonable age to facilitate that". So, in 1983, Nuala went to Trinity College to study psychology and Irish, and Peter joined her there in 1988 while she was doing her Higher Diploma in Education.
"There were tremendous pressures to work and earn a living, yet I could escape from that through study and when the pressure of study got too much, I could escape from that into my trade union work. It was like having complementary yet different parts to my life," says Bunting.
This double life required a lot of discipline - studying at weekends and working early shifts on the buses and then attending afternoon lectures or vice versa. He acknowledges the support he received from co-workers during this time, some of whom picked up his children from school in Marlborough St, giving them a ride home on their bus route to make sure they got off at the right stop.
"I simply couldn't have done it without them," he says. CIÉ also paid half his college fees.
His most difficult year was 1991 when he juggled the demands of his final year at college with full-time work as a trade union official with the NBRU. "All hell broke loose in industrial relations and I was unable to attend any lectures, but I managed to shift from the network which supported me to get to college to the network in college, drawing support from a very close group of friends who had come together initially as a study group.
"We were poles apart in terms of our lifestyle, politics and culture. I came from a working class, militant trade unionist background in Belfast which flew in the face of everything they did and yet we became very close friends," he says.
When college finished, he threw himself into industrial relations work, becoming general secretary of the NBRU and overseeing the full implementation of the one-person operated buses, which, according to Bunting, brought Irish bus workers to the top of the league in payment terms in the EU public transport industry.
Two things then prompted him to change jobs. "I realised then that you can only have such major victories once in your life and I didn't want to see out the remainder of my time, resting on my laurels.
"Simultaneously, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions was looking for someone with senior responsibility for Northern Ireland."
He got the job and since then has perhaps faced the biggest challenges in his whole career, merging his personal experience and understanding of Northern Ireland, with his educated view and all the political changes that have occurred in the meantime.
"I'm enjoying it immensely. There is a huge challenge there. And in Northern Ireland, things can only get better because I think most people want to move things on in a progressive way."