The story of the Dunnes Stores strike, when it’s told, often begins on July 19, 1984, with a woman approaching a supermarket till on Dublin’s Henry Street. Mary Manning, the twenty-one-year-old sitting behind the till, tells the woman that she can’t handle the two grapefruits in her basket because she’s following an instruction from her trade union to boycott goods from apartheid South Africa. Manning is then sent up to the manager’s office, where she’s given the opportunity to change her mind. When she refuses, she’s suspended, and nine of her colleagues — Karen Gearon, Cathryn O’Reilly, Tommy Davis, Theresa Mooney, Veronica Munroe, Sandra Griffin, Alma Russell, Michelle Gavin, and Liz Deasy, all between the ages of seventeen and twenty-eight — walk out alongside her and onto a picket line.
But the truth is that the events of the strike had been set in motion long before that day. “We were following a union instruction because we had been treated so badly in work,” Karen Gearon says. Gearon, now in her sixties, was the Irish Distributive and Administrative Trade Union (IDATU) shop steward for the Henry Street Dunnes in 1984 and Mary Manning’s best friend. “If we had been working in a nice environment, would we have taken that union instruction seriously? I don’t know. Probably not.”
The grievances of the workers and IDATU members — most of them women — against the managers at Dunnes — most of them men — were already manifold in July 1984. They were only allowed two toilet breaks of eight minutes each per day, despite the toilet being eight floors up; their bags would be searched when they left the shop and a point made of embarrassing them if pads or tampons were found; there were allegations of…
Auteur: Francesca Newton
