Omnibus – A tale told in a bottle

This column by the late JPâ€Ë†Burke was first published on February 24, 1990. THE ALARM about the famed Perrier water, or more correctly its pollution by some chemical agent in the bottling process, must be an extreme annoyance to the abstemious in the cocktail set who prefer their French tipple direct from the Alps in its pristine state. Even though it's only natural spring water, Perrier has achieved a distinction in the market place which could be engineered only by French flair for making the ordinary appear extraordinary. Or in other terms, giving plain water with mineral elements a French accent, just like perfume! In the past two years Perrier has found an Irish competitor or two, and you can have your Ballygowan with orange or other fruit essence. They in turn are challenged by Tipperary spring water, and for a while last year I saw Connemara water on shop shelves â€â€ but you might recall that the Connemara Gateway and Coast hotels presented bottled air to their guests. Maybe it was a case of if you can't go fishin', then the air is free! (Of course we all know that nothing is free in this life â€â€ not even the best things).[private] And all that is prompted by the discovery of an old bottle on the one hand and the closure of the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Tuam on the other. Many of the workers who have lost their jobs in the glass and chromium factory on the verge of Hogan's bog on the Galway Road had their start in life in Egan's mineral water factory adjacent to the railway level crossing, or they had gained apprenticeship there as sons of long term employees whose wages were often counted in shillings rather than pounds in the poor old days. But no matter how much or how little the men and boys earned, they all had an unswerving loyalty to the firm, which was one of the first users of electricity from the local power company that replaced the gas company. There was an unusual connection in that situation too, for while a man named Ormsby from Ballina was in charge of the gasworks â€â€ now the site of the new youth training centre â€â€ the mineral water company was owned by the Egan family, also from the North Mayo capital. The locals preferred their Egans with the broad Irish accent, and many a young lad earned his first bob or two in 'Aigin's', nearer in sound to the original Gaelic patronym. The man that I and most of my generation remember as first boss of Egan's mineral waters was a tall lean man named Murray, who used to roll his own cigarettes and was somewhat aloof in manner, though those who worked under him held him a gentleman. In due course he retired and was succeeded by another Egan, not one of the Ballina family but John Joe, born and bred in Tuam whose ancestors had built part of the Cathedral and the new St. Jarlath's College. He was in the Dale Carnegie mould, a snappy dresser and an inveterate pipe smoker, who had a kind of Seán Lemass approach to Irish industrial growth. He was a fine speaker and had a good turn of humour and he made Egan's a thriving business, not merely manufacturers of mineral waters like lemonade and orange crush but bottlers of wine and spirits. I knew a few young lads who first went over the top when engaged in the process of racking whiskey! These were the days of the Reillys, Jack and Tom, and gangling Mick who drove the horse float around the town making deliveries and was never short of a crack. In due course, John Joe Egan smoked his final pipe and from the growing staff of the factory, most of them CBS graduates, came a new boss, the late Dermot Grehan from Kilbannon. Later years brought more changes and I remember well the day James A Farley, the towering giant of Coca-Cola and one time Postmaster General of the USA, came to open the shining new bottling plant to mark the grant of the Coke franchise to what had been Tuam's main industry before the arrival of the sugar factory of bittersweet memory. A new man was then in charge, the dynamic Tom Naughton, a hard driving executive who never spared himself and had a great gift of friendship and humour. His tragic death in a car crash in February 1973 only a short distance from the Coke factory was an appalling shock and loss to the town he had taken to his heart. He was succeeded by PJ Grealish, a family relative, for many years prominent in the Boy Scouts and now a succesful hotelier. His successor is again an Egan, this time Sean from the DE Williams company in Tullamore, who brought new marketing expertise to the business. It is sad indeed that he should be the last Egan to run the factory that spread the name from Ballina and Sligo to Tuam, and which is being swallowed up by Coke to become just a small pawn in a multi-national conglomerate which loves to give the world a non-alcholic drink. Now all that's left is the fizz. Egan's of Tuam, Ballina and Sligo withstood the competition from the famed Galway city company headed by the legendary Joe Young, said to have been mentioned by Lord Haw-Haw, alias William Joyce, in one of his 'Germany Calling' programmes, promising to see him at the Galway Races. Poor Joyce, Irish bred and anti-British, could not escape the vengeance of the ruling class who could not then, nor now, see the stupidity of their actions. And now in the final paragraph, I come to the bottle that recalled the native industry of the early 1900s, when the Sinn Fein doctrine was being out into practice by the very class who scorned the notion of Irish nationhood or by the enthusiastic young men with bright dreams and little capital. The bottle I have before me now is long necked and green tinted, and it bears the stamp 'Ruane's Mineral Water Works, Athenry', with a circular crest and the inscription 'Cresco per Crucem', surmounting a horse with banner, probably the arms of the Ruane family. I knew the head of the company, James J (Jim) Ruane, who later went into the motor business, and I count his son Tom among my friends in that historic town. But like the Egans in Tuam, and the Youngs in Galway, the Ruanes of Athenry had to give way to the new trend in industry that closed the small family concerns and left only a memory and a message carried in a stray bottle. You could have put a message in a bottle and sent it on the waves to nowhere, but what can you do with an empty Coke tin?[/private]