Mary Manning

The longer we were on strike and the more we learned, the more determined we became.

Like we literally had people who said, oh, he wouldn't blame me touching him.

I wouldn't touch him if a black person touched him either.

We heard of priests who were in the pulpit telling people to go into the store, that what we were doing was hurting the black people in South Africa.

We had people who were arguing with us.

We had a lot of, at the time, there was a fair few white South Africans who were over in Ireland are coming.

This was not in one day, this was over probably months.

And they'd always make a point of coming up to the picket line and, you know, kind of berating us and telling us what we didn't know what we were talking about.

No, I had personally never met, and none of us had, none of the strikers had.

Now, there were black people living in Ireland, but I mean, at the time, a lot of black people were studying in colleges and stuff, which wasn't the kind of environment that we all went around in.

He was an ex-Trade Union leader.

He was exiled from South Africa and had been living in Ireland for a couple of years.

He walked up in the ambulance every day.

He was an ex-teacher as well.

So he was actually a typical, he was a teacher in that he taught you what was happening without kind of, you know, making you learn it, if that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, he was someone you wanted to talk to.

And the more we heard about what it was like for a black South African to live there, the more we were determined that, like, what we were doing was the right thing.

Plus, black people in South Africa had asked for this boycott.

Nimrod explained it to us one day.