Grapefruits vs Apartheid
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In a Dublin supermarket, a young woman is working at the checkout. And like most 21-year-olds, this job, it's really just there to get cash for fun.
Her aim in life was to get enough money to grow on the weekend.
She's a pretty shy girl, does what she's told. That is, until one day, a customer wants to buy something that she will refuse to sell.
Who wants to get the message around about what's happening?
but it was something happening 14,000 kilometres away. A war raging between freedom and oppression, between fear and defiance.
We didn't change apartheid, but we certainly, I suppose, brought attention to it.
My name is Mark Fennelly, and this is the wild saga of a handful of young women in Ireland who stood up for the rights of black South Africans during apartheid. Their strike sparked debate, drew attention far and wide and eventually helped change a law. But it all started with refusing to scan a grapefruit. Two grapefruit. Two grapefruit. Let's not forget the second grapefruit. And then I can assure you that at the time, no one saw it coming.
So today, the fine city of Dublin is home to around 1.3 million people. The city's got cobblestones, lots of beautiful historic buildings, and most importantly, it's the home of Guinness. But in the 1980s, things were not great. Inflation was high, people were leaving the country, unemployment was as high as 17% by the mid-80s.
So people were struggling to try and pay bills and stuff. But it was, yeah, it was a fairly busy city.
And what about you? What was going on with you at the time?
At the time, I was working in a supermarket called Dunn Stores in Henry Street, which is one of the main thoroughfares in Dublin City.
Right, so let me introduce you to Mary Manning. In 1984, she's just turned 21 years old. And Dunn Stores is this huge retail chain in Ireland, like multi-level, they sell clothes, homewares, groceries.
I worked in the grocery department, but it does have a drapery department and they're countrywide.
What led a young woman to refuse selling grapefruits in Dublin?
And as I said before, for Mary, the sole purpose of working was just to get enough money to go out on the weekend.
And as a place of work, Dunn Stores was, well... It wasn't the pleasantest place to be working in. The money was good, but just the conditions were fairly bad. And we had a lot of issues in the store at the time.
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 everybody was Mr, Mr, whatever they were.
Sounds really strict. Do you remember feeling like it was unfair at the time?
Oh, yeah, we were really angry about the stuff that was going on and the fact that they wouldn't actually talk to us. Although they were enforcing the rules, we didn't always follow them.
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.
Out of that 50 or 60 people that worked there, there was probably about 20 union members. Because of a recession, people got afraid to join unions because they didn't want to go on strike, couldn't afford to go on strike. So it was kind of a mixture of really staunch trade unionists and people who were in the union but were only in it kind of for protection, if you like, from being sacked or whatever.
Then one day in 1984, the union sent all of its members a message
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