Documentary tells story of docks through workers’ eyes

ARCHIVAL footage mixed with accounts of life working in Cork’s docklands will feature in a special documentary to be screened tonight on TG4.

Na Duganna (The Docks) will be shown at 8pm and is told through the eyes of the men and women who spent their working lives there.

As the docklands are set for a €5 billion redevelopment, the documentary pays tribute to the men and women who have dedicated their lives to working often in harsh conditions on the city docks.

Patsy Quilligan, who worked on the docks for more than 40 years, recounts some of the harsh realities endured by dockers.

He saw dockers getting their noses broken in fights over the right to work.

“You were fighting for your living, if you didn’t go to work you didn’t get paid, that’s the way it was on the docks then.”

He will also provide viewers with an insight into the antiquated system which prevails in Cork docks to this day.

This system is known as the badge system. Men are hired on a daily basis as casual labourers. But it is the dockers with a badge who get first refusal of the jobs.

Cork city docks is one of the only port cities in Europe in which this system still exists.

“When we give up our badges there is nobody coming in behind us; when a docker dies now the badge dies with him,” said Patsy.

The documentary had a sell-out screening at Corona Cork Film Festival earlier this year

Also featured is Micheal Ó Cearbhaill, a former Dunlop employee, who remembers the dark days of 1983 and 1984 on the docks when the Dunlop and Ford plants folded, leaving thousands out of work and bringing the city to its knees.

Contributions are made by artists and writers such as William Wall and Trish Edelstein, who have used the docks as a source of inspiration for their work.

They give their own personal impressions of the landscape and the memories and emotions it evokes within them.

Na Duganna, a Hawkeye Films production, is directed by Pat Collins and is produced by Ciara Nic Chormaic.