It was a swap shop for robbers

Paddy Daly, 77, a retired garda from Artane, north Dublin, was a FIFA referee from 1975 to 1989. He is married to Muriel Gavin and they have two daughters and one grandchild. I WAS a guard in the inner city in the Sixties. Most wouldn’t realise this but people were so poor in those days that shoplifting was rife and pawn shops were huge.

In the big shops like Guineys and Boyers you’d have special guards in plain clothes watching shoplifters. All the shoplifters knew one another and, at around 6pm when the shops would close, they’d meet around Clerys’ clock. One could have been stealing jeans, another could have been stealing shoes and they’d swap. Many of my colleagues would have arrested people under the clock.

Dress dances were the go that time; they were sort of like a Debs now. They’d be on in the Metropole, the Gresham, the Shelbourne. You might meet a girl in the Crystal or the Kingsway ballrooms on a Thursday and you’d make a date for Saturday under Clerys’ clock. You mightn’t remember what she looked like and there could be 30 or 40 standing under the clock. They were innocent times.