Looking Back: Parcels in the bar

We're obliged to Martin Burke for this address section of a parcel which brings back memories, writes Brian Byrne.

Growing up through the 1950s in my parents' The Hideout pub, parcels were regularly sent by bus from Dublin for collection from the front bar by their recipients locally. The 'Byrne's Hotel' name referred to the premises from the time my grandfather opened it as that in 1925 — it became The Hideout when my parents took over in 1950.

Those were the days when the drivers and conductors of the CIE buses would come in for coffee, and sometimes something stronger, with their passengers. There was an official 15-minute stop period.

The parcels service was big for CIE then, and the packages would also include little octagonal boxes of day-old-chicks for people who raised chickens in the area (including my grandmother). I can still in my mind hear their 'cheep-cheep-cheep' sounds as they awaited collection, which had to be the same evening or they wouldn't survive.

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