Jim retires after 39 years
20.11.08
by
Damian Dowds, Inishowen Independent
JIM Henderson, Buncrana Town Council’s long serving
revenue collector, retired last week after 39 years of
collecting rents, rates and water charges in the urban
area.
Colleagues gathered in the Inishowen Gateway Hotel on
Friday for a lunch to mark his retirement, and the
council itself will hold an official retirement function
at a later date. Along with his wife Sally, Jim is also
well known for his work with the local meals-on-wheels
committee which provides hot dinners a couple of times a
week to more than 20 elderly people in the Buncrana
area.
“I started with the Council on the first Saturday of
July 1969, taking over from the previous rent collectors
Teresa Crossan and Rosaleen Doherty who had retired at
the same time,” Jim recalled. The position was part-time
at first and he collected house rents only, but in time
his responsibilities grew to include the collection of
water charges and commercial rates. |
“The water rates on homes
were always the most controversial and I wasn’t too
sorry to see them abolished in 1996,” he said.
Educated by the Christian Brothers in Derry, he spent a
couple of years in London, working first with the tax
office and then as a carpenter. On returning to
Buncrana, he worked with his brother Hugh, selling shoes
door to door from a van. Indeed, he continued to work in
the family business until the late 1980s before he went
full-time with the Council when his role was expanded to
include commercial rate collection following the
retirement of Colm Grant.
Rents today range from around €20 per week upwards, but
they were much lower when Jim Henderson first pounded
Buncrana’s streets with his rent collector’s book in
hand. “The lowest fixed rate was just five pence per
week,” he recalled, “and when the homes on St Egney’s
Terrace |
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were being bought out at a
fixed rate, the weekly repayment was just 11 shillings
and eight pence (approximately 60 pence).”
“The houses on Maginn Avenue sold for just £100 – mind
you some people at the time thought that was dear enough
and I suppose it was.”
He credits wife Sally with the position of unofficial
rent collecting assistant. “If I’d missed someone
because they were out, they’d sometimes call down to the
house with the rent and Sally would take a note of what
was what. She’s always been good like that.” The couple
have been married since August 1967 and have five sons –
Martin, Liam, Ciaran, Shaun and Hugh Patrick but no
daughters; “One woman about the house is enough,” he
quipped mischievously. So what kind of skills does one
need to be a revenue collector?
“Patience is the big thing, particularly when collecting
the commercial rates. You might have to call back time
and again to get the money, but you can never be abrupt
with people,” he says. “It’s a very people orientated
job, and I’d always have yarns with the people I’d meet
and carry news to them – or they’d give the news to me!”
Although he turns 65 tomorrow, he has no grand plans on
how to spend the retirement that now stretches out
before him. “I like footering about in the garden, and I
have a new greenhouse picked out but not yet bought. God
knows, with the summer we had, you’d need a greenhouse
in weather like this.”
His successor, Samantha Nolan, has been accompanying him
on his rounds for the past couple of weeks as she learns
the ropes. “I wish her all the best in her new post and
I’ve told her that she can contact me any time she needs
to. After 39 years at it, there’s not too much that I
don’t know about the job.”
Town Mayor Dermot McLaughlin paid tribute to Jim
Henderson at Thursday night’s Town Council meeting,
saying, “I thank Jim for his long service to the Council
and wish him a long and happy retirement.” |
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