Forty years ago, if you asked any 10-year-old boy what he wanted to be when he grew up, "train driver" would have been up there with "cowboy" and "astronaut" as likely responses. Even now, ageing corporate executives play with fabulously expensive train sets, fantasising they are in the cab of a mighty locomotive hurtling down the tracks at 90 m.p.h.
No other group of workers retained an aura of romance, adventure and power for as long as train drivers. Airline pilots may have prestige, but who writes ballads about them? Ship captains somehow faded from the popular imagination as figures of glamour. Yet somewhere in the dream life of men over 40, the locomotive driver forever rides the rails.
Casey Jones, the Irish-American train driver killed in a crash in 1906 became one of America's first indigenous folk heroes. John Ax, the English train driver who sacrificed his own life to save others in the 1950s, was immortalised by Ewan McColl in songs and a radio documentary. When he wanted an image of urban romance for Cypress Avenue, Van Morrison chose "the railway station/ Where the lonesome engine drivers pine". The notion of the man controlling the mighty iron horse and delivering his passengers safely and on time lingered long after the romantic age of steam had ended.
This image encouraged a kind of noblesse oblige among the drivers, who regarded their membership of an elite as conferring responsibilities as well as rights. The public benefited from a strong safety culture among the drivers, and the cost of undercutting that culture by crushing the rail unions, as Margaret Thatcher did in Britain, has become painfully obvious.
But the image of train drivers as an aristocratic elite within the labour movement has its drawbacks, and many of them have become apparent in the dispute between Irish Rail and the Irish Locomotive Drivers' Association which has played havoc with public transport over the last month. At the heart of that dispute is an attempt by ILDA and its leader Brendan Ogle to reestablish the special status of the train driver in a context where the old mystique no longer makes much sense.
The dispute may be concerned with rostering. ILDA claims the new arrangements agreed with the two main unions in Irish Rail, SIPTU and the NBRU, will be detrimental to the safe operation of the railways. Yet it is not easy for any objective observer to see how a shorter working week and more time off will undermine the ability of drivers to work safely. And if rail safety really was the nub of the matter, ILDA members would hardly have engaged in the kind of encroachments on level crossings we saw last week.
Much more salient is the gradual erosion of the train drivers' elite status. The trend within the trade union movement for decades has been for consolidation, with the old guild-like craft associations being submerged in large general organisations. SIPTU and NBRU are, in different ways, prime examples of the trend.
SIPTU resulted from a merger between two big general unions. The NBRU, once regarded as a breakaway union as ILDA is now seen, illustrates another aspect of this same consolidation process. Under Peter Bunting it has moved ever closer to the rest of the trade union movement and will probably be fully integrated into the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. In the negotiation of the deal for train drivers, SIPTU and the NBRU co-operated with remarkably little friction.
On the ground within Irish Rail, this process of consolidation has manifested itself in deals that tend to treat the workforce as a single unit, albeit with various particular concerns. Since this has resulted in concrete improvements for all, most workers have been happy to go along.
For some train drivers, however, the whole process threatens their self-image as a special group. Hence ILDA, a body whose very title ("locomotive drivers" rather than "train drivers") stresses the elevation and nobility of its members' calling. While the rest of the Irish trade union movement has become subtle, sophisticated and, in the broadest sense, political, Brendan Ogle has driven his campaign with an old-fashioned tunnel vision. He has done what very few union leaders would now dream of doing - lead an industrial dispute as if it was only about the workers and the bosses.
FROM long and bitter experience, union leaders like Des Geraghty of SIPTU and Peter Bunting of the NBRU know that an industrial dispute, especially in the public sector, is also a battle for the hearts and minds of the public. Now and then, some groups of very powerful workers can afford to rely on pure muscle and ignore public opinion.
But ILDA is not one of them. If it was to win a struggle that is as much against SIPTU, the NBRU and its fellow train drivers as it is against Irish Rail, ILDA needed sympathy from the Government. And this would only result from the obvious presence of a sympathetic public. The bus drivers led by the NBRU showed how to do this a few months ago.
ILDA has provided an object lesson in how not to do it. With the weeks without pay having their effect on morale, ILDA's members struck out in desperation at the nearest available target - the travelling public. It raised the profile of the dispute, certainly, but at the cost of alienating most of the public and undermining the union's credibility on the very issue it claims to be most concerned about - rail safety. It was also to kill off whatever remains of the Casey Jones mystique. It is doubtful that very many 10-year-olds, slogging home on foot or waiting for a train that never came, would have answered the question of what they wanted to be when they grow up with "a train driver".