Armed with a placard, upon which was written, SIPTU Official Dispute, Vinny Fitzpatrick found himself shuffling along in a monastic hush, with a handful of colleagues on the Clontarf Road, just as the sun squinted above the Bull Island.
The first shift for striking Dublin Bus workers had begun at six bells on the Bank Holiday Monday morning. The crew included the longest-serving Clontarf driver, who readily volunteered for the dawn patrol.
After the jarring events of the previous fortnight, Vinny felt the gentle sea breeze would help unclog his little grey cells and focus on more pressing matters.
By rights, he should be dreaming of Sam Maguire returning to Dublin’s needy embrace but instead, his mind was troubled – by the rows upon rows of tethered buses in the garages across the city, the empty roads and signs on bus stops proclaiming that ‘Dublin Bus services are not in operation.’
How had it all come to this, he thought to himself? How had the management and unions become so entrenched, so distant from one another, that they dared to leave Dublin’s streets shorn of their noble chargers?
What would become of Mr and Mrs Sean Citizen in the morning when they left their homes for work and found themselves having to pay through the nose for taxis or walking for miles? And what were the stranded tourists making of the shenanigans?
Pretty quick, they’d all have it in the neck for Dublin Bus drivers, reckoned Vinny, no matter what SIPTU spiel was spun.
Folk didn’t give a fig about drivers losing a slice of their Bank Holiday premium payments and over-time, or whether their management overlords accepted pay cuts of five per cent, thought Vinny.
All they wanted was their buses to turn up, on time, and transport them to where they had to be.
Such a simplistic view, Vinny knew, would fall on deaf ears in Dublin Bus, where some of the chest-beating union agitators felt they were Jim Larkin reincarnated.
Couldn’t they cop on that this was 2013, not 1913? And the days of the brother-workers-in-arms were with Mick O’Leary in the grave?
Vinny reckoned the only union with any clout these days was the Irish Rugby Football Union and even they weren’t quite as well off as before. The world was spinning at a slower pace, there was less money to go around, and it was time everyone caught themselves on.
Vinny recalled a regular in Foley’s, Inky Potts, who used to work as a sub-editor for a national newspaper in the city. Inky would regale the lads about his four-day week, seven-hour day, €300 bonus for working on a Bank Holiday, six weeks annual holidays, taxis home after 11pm and expenses.
Now Inky was saddled with a five-day week, nine-hour shifts; he got diddly squat for Bank Holidays and had a week’s less holidays. Was he out on the streets protesting? No, he was keeping his head down, chuffed just to have a job.
A part of Vinny blamed himself. He had been so wrapped up in negotiating his own exit strategy, so distracted by a fat pay-off, that he’d taken his eye off the escalating industrial dispute under his bulbous nose.
Usually, he could head off trouble at the pass, lobbing in a quiet word here and there in the ears of lads who exerted influence among drivers and office staff.
As he half-heartedly traipsed Clontarf Road between Foley’s and The Shingle pubs, Vinny was furious for placing his own welfare ahead of the people who mattered, the people who put the ‘us’ in Dublin Bus, the paying passenger.
Suddenly, the Dublin Bus motto ‘Serving The Community’ seemed shallow and inappropriate. No one was being served today and no one would be served tomorrow either.
At the core of the row was a €11.7million yearly saving which seemed a relatively trivial sum to go to war on, considered Vinny.
Any Premier League club worth its Champions League salt wouldn’t think twice about spending €11.7million a year on a half-decent player, while the amount wouldn’t cover Wayne Rooney’s wages for a year.
Vinny felt it was time to don his bullet proof vest of honest broker and strive to pull the ego of management and the doggedness of workers together. He would try and succeed where the LRC and Labour Court had failed.
As he formulated a strategy, his focus was broken by someone shouting his name. Instantly, he recognised the voice. It was Niamh, his grown-up daughter, who had taken up residence in the old Fitzpatrick family home around the corner in Causeway Avenue to avoid the bruising fists and stinging taunts of her husband, Roberto Rossi, an ex-pro.
Niamh had taken the summer out to extract herself from Roberto's clutches but was shortly heading back to her job with the Manchester Evening News for the start of the Premier League season.
As she approached, pushing her sleeping son, Little Vinny, in the buggy, the lads on the picket came to attention, which was understandable as Niamh was a corker – she had an uncanny resemblance to the late Natalie Wood. One or two strikers let out a soft whistle.
“I thought you guys might need some sustenance,” she said, reaching under the buggy for a stuffed sports holdall. Within moments, the marchers were munching bacon and sausage butties, smothered in brown sauce, and sipping hot, sweet, tea from plastic cups.
After a 15-minute break, Niamh gathered up the rubbish, gave her old man a peck on the cheek, and turned towards Causeway Avenue. As she sashayed away, one of the strikers, Deco, said aloud: ‘‘I wouldn’t mind having breakfast with her every morning.”
Vinny’s dander, which had been simmering all morning, was up. He toddled across to the grinning driver, who towered above him. “See this,” he said, clenching a meaty fist. “Any more comments like that and I’ll plant you, top Deco, and bottom Deco. Is that clear?”
