Jim Austin
“The Docks were a place of great immediacy”
“One was constantly trying to think on one’s feet to plan the opportunities to put together a wage within a week.”
“We have had a number of cases where wives have allegedly suffered loss of life as a consequence of handling clothes of men who were working and handling asbestos.”
“At the deep sea docks in 1972 we had a register at agreed at the union of six hundred and seventy nine men. When we finished in 1995 with the two de-casualisation schemes, there were only thirty-five men left in the industry by that time, because of the reduced demand for labour and the new technologies in the port of Belfast.”
“When I came in to the docks at the beginning there was something like ten million tonnes of cargo coming into the port with a register of nine hundred and thirty men, on deep sea only. At the moment theres more than double that [cargo] with only a small handful of men.”