Category: Non-Fiction Short Stories

It was in October 1979, that over a foggy winter weekend I drove my bosses, 80% seatless  Peugeot 604, crammed to the roof with dress  jewellery from an important customer to their European head office in Rantigny France, about 60 km north of Paris.

I was the manager of the Ro-Ro and Deep Sea Export Department for the shipping company based in South West Dublin.

The shipment of urgently required high-end costume jewellery had to be in Rantigny first thing on Monday morning, and would normally have been shipped air freight from Dublin on Saturday via our Air Freight office at the airport, but due to the fog which was  expected to prevail all day Saturday and into Sunday, there were no flights leaving Dublin airport.

Continue reading “A Surprise Trip to Paris.”

Sandymount Strand

Sandymount in Dublin Ireland is where I grew up and lived for the first 30 years of my life.

It is a seaside district on the south side of Dublin Bay, with the greatest expanse of open sand imaginable at low tide.

It’s been a while but I thought that I’d go down recently to visit my childhood.

Continue reading “Sandymount Strand.”

Dublin’s Quays

Introduction

Ever since the early Viking settlers built wooden quays at the dark pool on the river Liffey, Dublin’s future as an important trading city, of the Norse empire, the native Irish and then the Norman and British empires, and now for the Irish again, seemed assured.

The river was straight and navigable for several miles inland, making it an ideal artery, first for carrying raiding parties and then for trade.

After the expulsion of the Norse men in the eleventh century, Dublin while not yet the capital, was the east coasts most important trading hub.

Continue reading “A history of my families on Dublin’s Quays.”

When I joined the FCA (An Fórsa Cosanta Áitiúil) Local Defence Force in 1970, I was just fourteen. The rules in those days were somewhat flexible. I should have been seventeen, so the officer with whom I filled out my application forms in Griffith barracks on the S. Circular Rd, told me to put 1953 down as my year of birth.

Did I look seventeen when I was actually fourteen? Did I hell !

Continue reading “Five years in the reserve Armed Forces FCA”

.

On Friday 25th of May 2018, the day of the referendum to do with repealing the eighth amendment to the Irish constitution.

I am a disabled man, tetraplegic but with some use of my arms and hands following an accident in April 2016, I get around in an electric wheelchair. I was 62 at that time.

My friend drove me to the polling station, it was a beautiful day in late May and everything was in full bloom. I remember hearing the garden blackbirds singing for all they were worth as we left the house.

Read mo

I brought Robert M Utley’s excellent book The Lance & the Shield with me on the trip to Ghana, and I read it on the way back. I had read Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Smith a year or so previously, and It had piqued my interest in the Plains Indians, and their struggles against the unstoppable wave upon wave of whites, flowing west across the Great Plains.

Continue reading “Robert M Utley. My thoughts on Manifest Destiny”

Through my hobby I had gotten some fuzzy career guidance information on professional diving, and over time I convinced myself that I didn’t really like my job in shipping (even though I actually did) and that I should spend thousands of pounds and seven months, remodeling myself from white collar worker to rough and tough commercial diver mixed gas diver. I’d still get to see all the wonders of the deep ocean and professional divers are really well paid…….I heard.

Continue reading “Professionally Diving Prodiver Engineering 1985 .”

Algoaisaibi Diving and Marine Services, in Dhahran Saudi Arabia, were at that time running the biggest diving project in the world.

An Irish accountant, who worked for them, recruited me in April 1986. He got my name from Pro Dive Ltd in Falmouth, where I had done my diving training, and telephoned to offer me a job based on their recommendation.

The starting day rate was $350 per day; and he would expect me to do at least 110 days. Well it didn’t take a genius to work out that I would earn a lot more money doing 110 days in Saudi Arabia, than I would in Dublin doing 10 or 15 in the same time frame.

Continue reading “Saudi Arabia Professionally Diving Offshore”

In August 1988 I did a very well paid ‘nixer’ for Oceaneering International, while home on leave from Saudi Arabia.

My day rate while with Oceaneering leapt to 850 pounds sterling, that was an example of the big-pay packets, rumored at when I trained for the profession initially; very handy money if I could do my shift in a month, because I did not wish to give up my day job in Saudi Arabia.

Continue reading “August 1988 Oceaneering job in Kinsale & back to Saudi Arabia.”