Page 14 - COBH EDITION 1st SEPTEMBER DIGITAL VERSION

‘I’m glad the Poles have settled in well over here’ - Trevor Laffan
When I was a young lad, we were always complaining that the guys from the Naval Base in
Haulbowline were coming to Cobh and taking all our girls. They were worse than pirates.

Many of them weren’t even from Cork. They came from far
flung places like Wexford and Clare and some of them were
even Dubs. Many of them eventually ended up getting mar-
ried and settling in the town and we were forced to grant
them asylum. Over time, we learned to live with it.

I recently heard some people complaining about foreigners
coming over here and taking all our jobs. They were moan-
ing about how these people will chance their arm at anything
while they can’t even speak English. Sounded like the Navy
was up to its old tricks again, but it wasn’t that. They were
talking about the Polish community.
I think that’s unfair, and I want to set the record straight. I
have met a lot of Polish people over the last ten or twelve years and my experience has been
very positive. I think they are a tremendous asset to our county and I’ll tell you why.
I was in PC World looking for a laptop computer. My knowledge of electronics is fairly limited
so I was relying on help from the assistants. I was lucky enough to meet a guy called Pawel,
pronounced Pavel I think. As the name suggests, he is from Poland, and he has great com-
mand of the English language and he knows his way around a computer.
He told me all about tetra bites, megatrons, Inspiron thingy’s and milky bars and a whole
bunch of stuff that went straight over my head. Once he realised what kind of an idiot he was
dealing with, he began using baby talk and then he started making sense to me. He was a
very good humoured, knowledgeable guy who went out of his way to help me. I followed his
advice and everything he told has turned out to be right.
On another occasion, myself and my wife called into in our local bank to check on how our
millions were doing. We were dealing with a girl who is very pleasant with a smiley face and
she is extremely efficient. Her name is Romana and I asked her about the name. I had heard
of Ramona, but I had never heard of Romana and I thought that maybe it was a misprint on
her name tag.
She explained that her name is Polish and that she has been living in Cork for the last ten
years. I was surprised to hear that because to me, she had a local accent. That shouldn’t
have surprised me but it did.
Then I thought of a Polish family who rented our house a few years ago while we were trying
to sell it. They were a married couple with a few children and they stayed there for a couple
of years. They were great tenants and we never had an ounce of trouble from them. When
they left, the house was in better condition than it was when they moved in. It was spotless.
One of the reasons we moved from that house was that there were a lot of trees around the
property and a fair amount of hedging and it took a lot of maintenance. Eventually, I had to
farm out that work and I came across a couple of guys who looked after it for me and they
did a great job and they too were Polish.
I was having trouble with a few windows in my current home for a few years. They weren’t
closing properly at the top or the bottom, only in the middle so they were draughty.