Conor Sheahan

And as I said before, for Mary, the sole purpose of working was just to get enough money to go out on the weekend.

So for some time now, Mary and her colleagues have been trying to sit down with management to talk about their working conditions, things like toilet breaks, and they were being patted down to check that they hadn't stolen anything.

And weirdly, they weren't allowed to call anyone by their first name.

So we've got a group of young women working at a supermarket chain who are all friends, but they have to call each other miss for some reason, and they don't get on with management.

Crucial piece of information here is that they are all part of the union.

Then one day in 1984, the union sent all of its members a message

Now, at this moment, Mary and her friends, they kind of accept the directive, but they didn't really understand the context surrounding it.

By the time all of this was happening, South Africans had been living in a segregated country for decades.

In 1950, South Africans were classified by the colour of their skin.

You were either black, white or mixed.

By the time you hit the 1960s, you begin to see these policies of apartheid, which comes from the Afrikaans word literally meaning apart.

We're talking about a time where you had park benches with words like Europeans only or whites only.

And if a black African sat on one, they could be dragged off, arrested, fined, imprisoned.

Now, the government in South Africa at the time had the power to suppress virtually all criticism.

But there was still opposition.

Black African groups held demonstrations and strikes, and there were also some white people who supported their cause.

Which takes us back to the Dunstall staff room in Dublin, where Mary and her friends, they're reading their union's letter, asking them to refuse to sell any goods from South Africa.

So Mary worked in the grocery store section.

And what came from South Africa, well, mostly, it was fresh fruit.

When the unionised workers announced that they weren't going to sell South African produce, the bosses, oof, they were not happy.