SEOMRA SPRAOI ZINE ARCHIVE AND ‘BUSMAN’, FEB 1978
Mar 11th, 2010 by Conor McCabe
I was in Seomra Spraoi last night to pick up the latest edition of Loserdom and while I was there I called up to the zine archive. It’s on the first floor and it has a couple of hundred fanzines and alternative media publications from around the world, but mainly Ireland, UK, and USA. They are all sorted and boxed, but there’s no database, so I offered to work on producing one and so hopefully in a couple of months I’ll have it ready and on the web.
I got chatting to one of the guys, Ed, who runs the DIY Irish Hardcore Punk Archive, and who has a zine of his own, The Devil on 45, and I said to him that I’ve been up in the Irish Labour Museum for the last few months, sorting and cataloguing its newspapers and periodicals. “Oh” he said. “You might find this interesting. Niall McGuirk [of the Hope Collective] dropped this into us last week.” It was a copy of Busman from 1978, which seems to have been produced by bus workers in Phibsboro Garage. The issue has contributions from Bill McGamley, and an interview with Ruairi Quinn. I had my digital camera with me and snapped a quick copy. Now it’s a bit blurry, but Ed has a scanner in Seomra Spraoi and so next time I’ll get a proper copy.
Contents:
1. Assaults on busmen
2. Road Traffic Act
3. Inspectors and Discipline
4. Privilege Travel
5. Equal Pay Dialogue
6. Ruairi Quinn T.D.
The look and aesthetic of Busmen is fanzine to the core, but the content is industrial relations in scope and direction. Not that unusual. The Revolutionary Marxist Group, for example, had a publication called Irish Trotskyist (PDF copy here) which could almost pass for a fanzine in look and aesthetics as well. There’s a definite study there on the layout and feel of Irish fanzines and political publications of the 1970s.
Anyways, here’s the link to a somewhat blurry copy of Busmen (7MB).
Hope they weren’t giving out racing tips - the cover has them backing a non-runner (one-person buses not lasting).
:
Fairly fanzine look to it alright. Would remind me of some of the bus subculture - ‘Donnybrook Garage’, that conductor RTE once did a report on (conductor by day/crossdressing Rocky Horror Picture Show head in Harold’s X of a Friday night) and, of course, yer man Conrad….
Good excuse for the Frank & Walters best song of the lot
Jaysus, I had forgotten about the busman and the Rocky Horror Show. And Frank and Walters
ALWAYS bring a smile to my face.
Fantastic, thanks for taking the time to get this online. I’d love to know if the first two issues are about, and also if this zine was ’stamped out’ by those above its producers!
It carried on until, at least, summer 1980 when July saw no.14 published (it had changed its title to ‘Busworker’ by then).
‘The Busman/Busworker’: one of the great ‘rank and file’ industrial papers of the 1970s and 80s. This was unusual in that it did not stem from a ‘Trotskyist’ initiative, or from the occasional Trotskyist-libertarian collaboration. Denis Dennihy, once of the Dublin Housing Action Committee, and of never-to-be-forgotten memory, was involved along with Bill McCamley. Bill revived the mag in a slightly different form later on. Another ‘Busworker’, that of the Busworkers Action Group, not at all close to Bill McCamley, is (or was) probably the last surviving unofficial industrial paper. Until the next round. A second generation of the McCamley name is active in Dublin bus trade unionism too. Bill has written a history of the Dublin tram workers.
That’s great background detail d_d, thanks