German Tourists
By Liam Gleeson
Transcript
It was a beautiful Summer’s Day on the Camas Road. My father-in-law Tommy Joy was sitting outside his home watching the world go by. A German tour bus pulls up across the road at the cattle mart. The passengers start to alight from the bus and walk towards the Rock of Cashel. Tommy walked across to tell the driver that there was a Bus Park up at the Rock if he drove up by the main street to Ladyswell. The driver in his broken English said it was ok, that the passengers might take longer on the walk giving him a longer break.
The conversation led to the sleeper trailer towed by the bus, the driver showed how they carried all their food and drink and only had to buy diesel on their trip to Ireland.
Sometime later, passengers started to arrive back to the bus. One passenger interrupted the driver and Tommy’s conversation, the question was translated for Tommy. The passengers had seen lots of castles and churches but would like to see the inside of an Irish home. Tommy agreed, but before he could warn his wife Agnes, the German tourists invaded the house, going into every room downstairs and upstairs, snapping photos, conversing in German. Agnes was sitting in the kitchen, knitting, and started to panic. Tommy reassured her that it was ok, the tourists just wanted to look inside an Irish home. For Agnes it was bad enough that strangers were in her house, but German strangers. What the German tourists did not know was Agnes had worked in London before the second world war and lived through the Blitz before leaving London in 1947. She had worked as a supervisor in a factory which made engine components for Spitfires, Hurricanes and Bombers.
When the tourists had left the house, Tommy was in big trouble. Agnes did not speak to him for three weeks. It was the day that World War Three nearly broke out in Cashel.
The Convoy
By Liam Gleeson
When the bypass of Cashel was opened in October 2004, the town of Cashel could start to breathe again. No long queues of traffic in the evening or delays while large trucks inched passed each other when they met-on Canopy Street or Boherclough Street.
May 2005, Cashel would again have to experience heavy trucks inching their way through the town from Ladyswell Street to the Cahir Road. The massive five-truck Irish sugar convoy followed a route which avoided bridges and the Cashel bypass had three bridges.
The convoy was carrying 1000 tonnes of evaporator, these were cylinder in shape. Each truck was 125 feet long, 24 feet high, 18 feet wide. Each truck featured 64 wheels on the low-loader which could be steered from both cab and the rear. They had only mere inches to spare as it manoeuvred around Canopy Street to Main Street and Lower Gate to Boherclough Street.
Hundreds of onlookers had thronged the streets. Small children past their bedtimes, cameras flashing, camcorders rolling, there was a carnival atmosphere. Young and old might have imagined the gigantic convoy carrying Nasa’s Saturn V rocket for an Apollo mission or that it was part of an alien spacecraft.
Crews from the ESB and Eircom were on hand to raise or disconnect overhead lines to allow the convoy to keep moving. I arrived in the town as the first truck had reached Lower gate street, the men in yellow vests speaking into walkie-talkies relaying every movement of the load to the driver. The guards ushered people to keep a distance. After many anxious moments, the first truck successfully manoeuvred around the corner and up Boherclough Street. As the driver accelerated slightly to pull up the hill, smoke from the tall exhaust stack behind the driver’s cab bellowed against the wall of the houses. People who were leaning from their upstairs windows observing the convoy quickly retreated to close the windows.
It took approx. five hours for all five trucks to successfully traverse through the town. Everyone had a different experience that night and it was spoken of in conversation for a long time after.