Driving through Dublin at six o'clock of a dark, wet Thursday morning, the icy-cold streets are practically deserted. Then you swing a right into Mary's Lane at the back of the Four Courts and you're transported to forklift nirvana. Mountains of fruit, vegetables, flowers and fish are being loaded and unloaded, shifted and manoeuvred at a fierce and frenzied rate. Like one of those scenes of bustling, purposeful activity that James Bond invariably stumbles across in the most unlikely of places, it's pallets-in-motion big time.
"Half of Dublin wouldn't know where this place is," says one fruit wholesaler. A lot of people confuse it with Smithfield, a quarter mile away. Inside the ornate facade of Dublin Corporation's fruit and vegetable market, Bernie Rush and Patrick Rhatigan of Patrick and Bernie's shop in Ballymahon, Co Longford, are buying fresh produce. They travel the 160-mile round trip every morning before their working day starts. They couldn't get the stuff as cheap as up here, they say. "There's no place like this down the country." Market wholesaler Pat Martin gets up at 4.30 a.m. every day, and is here by 5 a.m. "It's a ruthless, cut-throat business. Yes it is, oh yes it is," he says. "Customers will leave you for a penny. There's no loyalty. You're only as good as your last order. And in 25 years I've never got a phone call yet from a customer to tell me that I was too cheap. But you'd get 10 a day saying we were too dear."
Our conversation is repeatedly interrupted with the hustle and bustle of the market, much of it inter-trading between wholesalers. He roars an instruction to a colleague - "Thirty pallets to Mango Mangan's and 40 to Dennigan" - and now to a customer - "You see that pallet there, behind the melons? I'll give you 20 or 25 off that." Customer (another wholesaler): "Ah, I'd want more than that."
Pat Martin has as many stories as he has vegetables to sell, such is the changing face of the sales of fruit and veg. He says supermarkets have a monopoly. "Course they have, sure they've the biggest volume of sales. And everybody is answerable to them as well.
"Then this market has taken an awful knock in the last nine months. You know Musgraves, the cash and carry, well they've changed the whole supply network. They're sourcing their own veg through their own store out in Lucan somewhere. They've hit a lot of wholesalers. "Tesco hit the market very hard in that they've been bringing in a lot of imported produce." Then there's the question mark hanging over the future of the market. "This is an industrial estate in the middle of a residentialcum-tourist attraction. When the Luas is one end and you've a tourist trail the other end, how are 40 ft lorries going to park?" He personally favours moving the market elsewhere. "For easy access and all that. It's a nightmare here," he says.
Tommy Annesley of It's Fresh vegetable shop, in Arklow, is buying at Frank M Reilly Fresh Flowers and Plants. He travels the 96-mile round trip from Arklow three days a week. "I leave the house at 4 o'clock, I'm in Dublin 40 minutes later. I'm ready to go home now, at 6.30 a.m. I'll be home at ten to eight. The shop will be open at half eight."
The market used to be a lot busier. One customer says "I remember a time I used to come in here and the forklifts would be queuing up, fighting to get in there. Now look at it."
Derek Leonard has worked in the market for 21 years, since he was 14. He is the fifth generation of his family in the business. "If it grows, we have it. And if it doesn't grow, we'll grow it for you," he says.
He believes the writing is on the wall for the market. "It's definitely, in my opinion, gone. We're out of here. They're pouring big money into redoing up the front of this market. Like, if my great granny was here, it would be like the twilight zone, the front of it would be as she must have seen it in its original. But they're not cleaning it up for us. "They just basically want to turn this part of the city into Temple Bar part two, Smithfield, the whole lot, it's all happening. And what with the traffic that comes in - the Government basically wants that kind of traffic out of the city."
Across the road, the fish market looks more and more like a car-park due to co-ops selling direct, and a decline in the catch and the high price of fish, said one wholesaler. According to Alan Ecock, who traded here for 33 years, "The volume of fish has dropped drastically and is still dropping."
Another trader says: "There was a time you wouldn't get in the door. There used to be a thousand boxes of fish. Now you wouldn't do a thousand in a week in the whole market."
