Mary Manning

speaker

199 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 26 Jun

Mary Manning’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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No One Saw It Coming · Grapefruits vs Apartheid · 21 Jun 2026 podcast

We said, why?

And they said, well, because you need a visa to go to South Africa.

Now, people on an Irish passport at the time didn't need a visa.

Then they came over and they wanted us to take, to identify our luggage, to take it off the flight.

To them, what they did was they got a representative of the South African embassy, a man called Leo Evans, came to the airport to us to tell us that we weren't going to get into South Africa, that we hadn't got visas.

I went and phoned my next door neighbour to say to my mother and father, we're not going to be allowed on the flight, so we'll be home tomorrow.

And then the next thing, British Airways came over and said, literally just said, run, run, you're going on the flight.

So we literally had to get up and literally run down to get onto the flight.

We landed in Johannesburg, and we know it was when we landed that there was a lot of soldiers around, but we just kind of didn't really think too much.

We thought this was just the way it is, like, in South Africa.

And we walked into the terminal and we were approached by someone who said, are you the group travelling from Dublin?

And we said, yes.

And they said, OK, follow us.

And we had heard all these stories about activists falling out windows and being arrested and falling down stairs and stuff.

So we were terrified.

that nobody actually knew where we were.

Because the last thing that we had, and I wasn't the only one, other people had phoned home as well and said, look, we're not going to South Africa, we'll be home tomorrow.

There wasn't an Irish embassy in South Africa at the time, but two of the people who were travelling had British passports.

So they got to speak to the British consulate who basically said to them, nothing we can do.

So that was what everybody, like all our family spoke up to was, you know, where are they and what's happening?

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