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WHEN MARY MANNING first refused to handle two South African grapefruits while working on tills in Dunnes Stores Henry Street in 1984, she had no idea what it would spark.
Mary (who was 21 at the time) was complying with a directive from her union - IDATU – not to handle any South African goods in protest against apartheid in the country.
At the time, the African nation had a system of racial segregation in place, which was used in many ways to deny the rights of many black people in the country.
Various human rights violations were committed by the South African government. The apartheid system received widespread international condemnation, and a series of boycotts and embargoes were imposed on the country.
Mary Manning stepped unknowingly into history on the morning of 19 July 1984 when she refused to register the sale of the two Outspan grapefruits.
Management had issued a final warning to staff over refusing to handle South African goods. Mary had now defied that warning. She was brought up to the manager’s office and promptly suspended.
Mary left the store, and was followed out by nine of her colleagues (eight women, one man). None of them would return to work for nearly two years.
“In the beginning, the first few days we thought we would just be out for a few days and that would be it,” she told TheJournal.ie.
“But then we started to learn what was going on in South Africa and it became something much more than a union policy.
It became something that we all totally believed in and there was no way any of us could go back and handle South African goods.
On the picket line
Mary will publish a book later this month on her experience of the Dunnes Stores strike, as well as her family life and her life after.
Striking Back: The Untold Story of an Anti-Apartheid Striker is written with writer Sinead O’Brien and tells Mary’s story from her own perspective.
The head of the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement Kader Asmal publicly praised the strikers soon after their action began.
But initially, Mary and her fellow strikers found little support from other circles. Other unions did not strike in support with them, and Mary said they received abuse from members of the public and their co-workers in Dunnes.
Soon after their strike began, however, the Dunnes workers were joined on the picket line by exiled South African freedom fighter Nimrod Sejake.
The Dublin of 1984 was a different place, and Sejake was the first black person Mary and her colleagues had ever seen in real life. She said that his presence on the picket line was a turning point for her and her colleagues.
In her book, Mary describes Sejake as a quiet and unassuming man in his mid-60s. She recalls his response to a question about what his homeland was really like.
“He held up his right hand as though there were a glass in it and said:
‘You have to imagine South Africa as a pint of Guinness – the vast majority of it is black and a tiny minority is white – and just like a freshly poured pint, the white sits firmly on top of the black.’
Mary said that this painted a clearer picture of the situation in South Africa in her mind than at any point since the strike started.
As the months progressed, Mary and her colleagues got a few knocks, even as support for them and their profile grew.
She said that Dunnes management refused to negotiate or meet with them on any basis. As well as this, in October she said the head of the Irish Anti Apartheid Movement Kader Asmal withdrew his support for the strike.
She said they all were harassed regularly by the gardaí on the picket line at this time.
“We got an awful lot of knocks back. People who we thought would have supported us: the Church, the government – who were all members of the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement at the time,” she said.
“And one by one they either tried to distance themselves from us, or the government just didn’t support us at all.
We didn’t want the law to change but that’s what happened in the end – what we wanted was the right not to have to handle South African goods.
International support
The Dunnes strikers were given their greatest endorsement when the South African Bishop Desmond Tutu – at the time a vocal and renowned critic of apartheid – asked to meet them as he travelled to collect his Nobel Peace Prize in the December after the strike started.
Mary and Karen Gearon travelled to London Heathrow where they were interviewed by the international press, and their profile grew considerably.
Over the course of the remainder of the strike action, Mary and her colleagues would have a series of highs and lows.
They travelled to South Africa at the invitation of Desmond Tutu, only to be held under armed guard for 12 hours at a Johannesburg airport, before being sent on a plane back to Ireland.
They travelled to other countries for speaking arrangements, some occupied Dunnes Stores, they marched through Dublin with thousands of supporters and they received support and criticism from many high-profile names.
In the end, the Irish government passed laws banning the importation and sale of South African goods, and once all of the Dunnes Stores produce had been sold and the ban implemented, they returned to work.
However, Mary didn’t stay too long. Feeling she was blacklisted by employers in Ireland, she emigrated to Australia in October 1988 for five years.
She returned to Ireland in 1993 and has lived here since.
When questioned over the strike, if it changed her life and if she would do it again, Mary has no second thoughts.
“I’m very proud of what we did. It was something that we achieved. We feel like we achieved it,” she said.
“Whether the government ever admit it or not. There are probably things we would have done differently but we never would have changed it.
Still to this day I always say I’d do it again.
The story of a family
Mary’s book is about more than her experience of the Dunnes strike – a story she believes belongs to all of the strikers and one that has been told before.
Striking Back is also the story of her life after the strike, and the story of her family’s life before.
Mary’s father supported her throughout the strike action, but her mother was much more conflicted and worried for her daughter as her name began to appear in the newspapers more and more.
Mary’s mother Josephine was born out of wedlock and spent most of her childhood in the Goldenbridge industrial school run by the Sisters of Mercy.
“Her own mother had put her up to fostering and had just called to the door when I was about eight,” said Mary.
Josephine’s mother had gotten married and had had no other children. Known as “Aunt Mollie” in the family, she died when Mary was in her late teens.
“My mother went down to the funeral but was told to go home because she was making a show of herself,” said Mary.
“No one knew who she was. She was never recognised by her own mother, publicly – even though she’d had a relationship with her for 10 years.
So when she died her mother’s sister didn’t want her mother’s secret to come out.
While Mary didn’t really acknowledge it at the time, her mother’s own experience with the establishment had instilled in her a drive to kick back against the authority which had made life so difficult for her mother
“All these things have an effect on you,” she said.
“She was so afraid of standing up to the establishment – that had an effect when she was so afraid for me when I was on the strike because she knew we were going up against the government and going up against the Catholic Church.
She had never had the chance to do it. It made me stronger, I suppose, because she couldn’t stand up. But I could.
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And now with the end of apartheid, and South Africa going the same way as the rest of Africa, run by kleptomaniac murderous thugs, and all the markers for a developed society falling rapidly to the African norm, life expectancy, literacy levels, infant mortality, health care, not to mention crime rates which have shot up to the ceiling, on top of that the NGO Genocidewatch which monitors precarious inter ethnic tensions globally and uses a score between one and eight to determine the situation, has placed the status of White people at between five and six, polarization and preparation, level eight being actual genocide. Over 80,000 White people murdered in twenty years often in horrendous ways, many living in squatter camps, many others forced to flee abroad, forgotten by the worlds media, perhaps deliberately, unrecognized as refugees because they are the wrong skin color. Your idealism helped destroy the most advanced society in Africa, one that had a space program, and had to decommission its nuclear weapons before it could hand over the reins of power, to others who “are just like us”, was it worth it Mary? because I don’t think it was.
@Barrys Tea: Yeah you’re right it’s Mary’s fault! Hahahahaha
@Barrys Tea: interesting perspective. What’s your view on the impact of the European colonisation of Africa? How the continent was carved into chunks and exploited for its resources? How that exploitation continues to this day, and supports kleptocracies across the continent. Maybe you share Richard Spencer’s view that the African should be nothing but grateful for his encounter with white Europeans?
@Dave Bruen: Funny that it’s more difficult to manage a country where you have to ensure the rights and welfare of the entire population rather than just an elite percentage
@Barrys Tea: “Your idealism helped destroy the most advanced society in Africa, one that had a space program”
Ah. You’re saying they’d be better off now with apartheid and some terrible low-budget space program? Her idealism helped get rid of a disgusting regime and helped implement democracy. Get off your phony high horse.
“had to decommission its nuclear weapons before it could hand over the reins of power”
You say this as if it’s a bad thing… I don’t think you have any clue what you’re talking about, lad. You’re actually annoyed that the apartheid regime dismantled nuclear warheads they had developed covertly against the wishes of the UNSC which would’ve otherwise been handed over to the ANC you hate so much.
@Barrys Tea: do you seriously believe apartheid should have been allowed continue?!
@Dave Bruen: Yes true Africian countries were colonies but they got independence a long time ago..Many decades….There must come a point when you have to give at least a small portion of the blame for the failure of their economies… corruption and one party dictatorship to the ruling black governments……In Ireland a long time since we blamed the British when something went wrong with our economy….
@John003: but we are still fighting a civil war given the two main parties. And the third party is just 80 years behind because their part was excluded first time around.
African countries will need many Mike decades to evolve into best practice like …… oh who? There is no perfect system.
@John003: the damage done will take more than a few generations to fix. We destroyed cultures, drew borders, imposed our beliefs and still control the vast majority of mineral wealth. And when we gave independence, we then loaned them money for infrastructural development that we built, and by which kept them in debt.
@Dave Bruen: we?
@Matt Donovan: Yes in broad ethnocultural terms.
@Dave Bruen I agree colonization was bad for Africa, in the same way that Afro Islamic colonization of Europe is bad for native Europeans. However the Dutch who arrived on the Cape found it almost empty aside from some nomadic bushmen, it was only later as they moved north to escape the British they encountered the great migration of Bantu tribes, they have a longer historical presence in the southern tip of Africa than Xhosa or Zulus have. Their own free republics of Orange Free State ad Transvaal. which they wanted to farm and be left alone were conquered and stolen from them by the British when gold was discovered.
As for Richard Spemcer he apparently wants an ethno state for Whites, I personally believe a separate country for White people in the Cape area would be ideal, a place were they could live in peace away from the threat of genocide, surely you would not begrudge them that.
@Barrys Tea: So you’re an advocate of separatism and an apartheid apologist. They’re not views that I share.
@Dave Bruen: We will agree to differ then, as you oppose colonization I presume you are also against the colonization of Europe by both Africans and members of the Islamic faith, very much against the wishes of the natives, also?
@Malachi: The Bomb was developed by South Africans under sanctions, like it or not, it showed scientific prowess, now you have a health minister telling people that orange juice cures AIDs, a former PM who raped a HIV woman and said everything was ok because he showered and gave himself a good scrub, at bit of a culture difference there I would say on the scientific outlook. In SA under apartheid. The racism of Africans is incredible btw, have a look at how the Hutu treated the Tutsi, they had apartheid and no one gave a damn. As do many other African states although it is not formalized into law. Indeed apartheid could to be a sign that the Europeans had actually become truly Africanized by doing exactly what all other African tribes do.
Africans from all over the contingent were trying to cross the border illegally because as bad as it was, it was still better than what their own people offered. A bit like globalism today, its all one way traffic into historic White countries, at the same time all we ever hear is how racist we are supposed to be.
Well that word has lost all meaning as far I am concerned.
@Barrys Tea: Of course the idiots in the post-apartheid govt who spouted nonsense about HIV should be ashamed of themselves. That doesn’t mean apartheid was a valid alternative, don’t you get that?
I am not impressed that they built the bomb while under sanctions. All they did was collaborate with the Israelis who were also covertly and underhandedly building up their nuclear capability. It didn’t take that much scientific prowess to do, it took money + connections. The Pakistanis and Indians did it too.
Whatever attempt at a point you were trying to make re: Rwanda is lost on me. You mention an apartheid that led to a gruesome genocide and yet somehow long for the bygone era of apartheid South Africa. Doesn’t make any sense. Tribalism like that leads to genocide and ethnic cleansing.
@Barrys Tea: are you talking about Moors in the 8th century or the Ottoman empire in the 17th century? Or are seriously comparing the current migration of people into Europe from the Middle East and North Africa as colonisation? This mass migration has happened primarily because the West has consistently undermined government across the region, mainly in defence of Saudi Arabia, and certainly traceable directly to the 1990 Gulf War. So it’s almost 30 years of continuous Western sponsored war in that region. Go figure.
@Malachi: My point about Rwanda was there was a worse form of apartheid since the Belgium’s left, everyone could see were it was going to lead, however aside from a small inadequate UN force, nobody cared, nobody protested for injustices Africans commit against others, and Africans themselves don’t care, yet now the NGO Genocidewatch warns us that the possibility of the same is on the cards for the White minority, and guess what nobody cares, an African has more chance of gaining asylum if they are from Nigeria than a White Afrikaans has.
We are all tribal, and attempts to deny that tribalism or water it down to include everybody will fail. that is the animal we are, For all the billions of humans who have lived up until the modern era, over 99.99% were racists and tribalists, this period of time in the West is an anomaly, air travel, lack of hunger, easy sexual relationships because of contraception, etc, this will not last, and when the reset button is pushed all the fancy political and inter ethnic theories will mean nothing.
@Dave Bruen: No its not just North Africa and the Middle East though is it? Some of that it is possible to accept on a temporary basis, have a read of the nationalities who are “rescued” 12 miles off the shores of Libya, West Africans, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Eritreans, etc, these people are not fleeing but taking advantage of what is happening in Syria to come to the West.
Why has Ireland got so many Nigerians? We did not colonize them, they have a terrorist group there Boko Harem, so what? we had a civil or inter ethnic war up the North, and the US and Australia amongst others were prepared to deport people back here.
So Africa’s projected population figures are estimated to be 4 billion, if Mother Nature does not step in and do her thing, many of them will want to move to Europe, so as a small country who has already taken in thousands of bogus asylum seekers from Africa, answer me this what percentage of our population should be of African descent?
@Barrys Tea: Apparently, there are about 20,000 Nigerians in Ireland now? Hardly an invasion.
Many global companies are now relying upon Africa to meet growth targets, so investment will flow into the continent and there will be opportunity for its people to prosper there and not look to our cold rock for a better life.
It seems you believe that there will be a reset button and this period of time is an anomaly. I don’t agree. You’re trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube. Humans have migrated since the beginning of time, to explore, to survive. There has been conflict and exploitation but also enlightenment and learning. And if you manage to create an Irish ethnostate of pasty skinned Catholics, I’m off!
@Barrys Tea: By the way, on your population forecasts, you do realise that Africa is the almost the size of Europe, USA, India and China combined?
@Barrys Tea: What a complete assh*le you are.
@Dave Bruen: 20,000 (officially) the majority illegally here through fraudulent asylum claims, I am well aware of the size of Africa, however if Nature periodic intervenes to cull the population, or that population is only propped up through Western intervention, then it is not sustainable now, it wont be when it doubles. Well we shall see in the coming decades which version of human nature come out on top. If I am correct, it will give me no pleasure to say I told you.
@Nick Caffrey: what a completely childish thing to say.
@Barrys Tea: But I wasn’t arguing that the post-Belgian Rwanda was better… I’m arguing against apartheid. Neither apartheid regime was acceptable – one led to a horrific genocide but the principle of racial discrimination and ethnic cleansing is the same.
The idea of ethno-nationalism inevitably leads to ethnic cleansing and genocide. They tried this in Europe in the 90s with Milosevich’s ‘Greater Serbia’ and it ended up in mass murder and displacement of undesireables and needed international intervention to halt the massacres.
Tribalism/racism might be a part of our nature, that has absolutely no bearing on whether it is a good thing or not. Religious belief is part of our nature and that’s not valid either.
@Barrys Tea: I think you’d take plenty of pleasure in telling me you told me so! We’ll see.
@Malachi: So these are the lessons I took from South Africa, the Balkans and our own country, In a multi-ethnic society there will always be a dominant tribe or group who controls resources, the subordinate tribe will try to overthrow the dominant one using what weapons it has at its disposal, including moral weapons, once the dominant tribe is disposed or allows itself to be disposed, it is open to reprisals and will be treated like a second class citizen.
Tribes or groups that have an exclusive territory would be wary of allowing others in, especially those whose numbers will grow and challenge their hegemony. Assimilation is possible only in small numbers, people will die in defence of their territory or status, or in the attempt to achieve status or territory. No one will die for a multicultural society, although people will die because of it.
Roll forward to 2017 and every home in Ireland is awash with clothes and technology manufactured in Asian sweatshops by economic slaves, Africans are roared at on the Luas by our racist layabout scoombag youth.
@alphanautica:
Is that you Dil?
@alphanautica: “Africans are roared at on the Luas”, they apparently give as good as they get, if recent attacks in Gormanstown, Rush and Donabate, on the north Dublin rail line are to believed
A different era, a different morality.
Now when strikers like the Luas workers take a principled stance there is little or no public support, only condemnation driven by anger at every little disruption to the modern consumer’s pursuit of materialistic satisfaction. Ireland has changed since the Celtic Tiger. If this strike happened nowadays Fine Gael would haul you all before the courts for threatening the company’s profit margin.
@Dean Moriarity: Unions should be banned ..They are no good for society..Full of communists and marxists
A time when half the country thought statues were moving so this had to be headline news
Something to do
Had all the clout of Ballyhea Says No
@frank sullivan: Yet they still had and have the moral fortitude and courage to speak out!
Unlike the morally bankrupt cowards and quislings who will throw their family, friends and neighbours under a bus for the whiff of approval and a tousle of their hair by their “superiors”
Ah yes 1984, when we only had black and white photos………
Was Joan Burton involved in that protest as well
@cormac o neill: no ,not to my knowledge
@cormac o neill:
No, but she still has the same 80′s haircut today.
@cormac o neill: yes we should trust businesses and corporations to treat workers with dignity
It was a tough time for those workers, Mary Manning eventually lost her house due to inability to pay the mortgage. She ended up living in Australia.
A few years ago Joe Duffy (RTE) had Ben Dunne on the radio and brought Mary Manning on the line as well – Ben Dunne apologised to Mary for the way he had treated them during the strike.
https://youtu.be/TER_M3KNVCE
Nicely described
At the time when the moving statues moved people
De ayties wer grate
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