When Eugene Diamond opened his newsagent’s shop on August 1, 1979, aged just 21, Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister and Jack Lynch was coming to the end of his second term as Taoiseach.
The 62-year-old has been running his shop in the town centre for almost 41 years, “man and boy”, as he put it, opening from early in the morning until late at night.
But none of his years of business experience prepared him for what happened when the coronavirus pandemic hit.
Mr Diamond said lockdown has been the greatest challenge his shop has ever faced “without a shadow of a doubt”.
“I went through periods where we were threatened every other week about selling different newspapers,” he said.
“The police had called with me on numerous occasions because I’d sold the Sunday World and the Sunday Life. (I was threatened) ‘don’t be selling The Irish News tomorrow’. Those things were a breeze. This has been a totally different character; it totally turned everything on its head.”
Although newsagents were among a small number of essential businesses which were allowed to stay open, Mr Diamond decided to close for the first time in decades due to health concerns.
“I closed on March 24. I’m a diabetic and I was a bit worried but my wife was more worried about me,” he said.
“I didn’t open again until May 18. Things seemed to be opening up again then. I was taking my lead from what was going on down south. Things seemed to be more positive and they (the Republic) were opening up.”
He introduced several safety measures in the shop, including a plastic screen between staff and customers. He also reduced his opening hours, partly due to less footfall around Ballymena town centre.
“We have a few staff coming in but we’re not back to full hours,” he said.
“For 40 years I used to open at 5.30am and closed at 10pm. At present we still do 5.30am for five days a week and we close at seven. On Saturdays and Sundays we open at 6.30am.
“To be truthful there is a lack of people still going to work at the weekends.”
Mr Diamond said the “working man, plus pensioners” make up the core of his customers.
“People want to say hello and be able to speak to the person behind the counter, you know,” he said.
“We would have a yarn with somebody. Now it’s changed a fair bit because there’s times when you’re fairly busy and you don’t really have the time to talk to people the way we would have. But it’ll come back.
“I’ve been quite strict about keeping the two metres (of social distancing)…People are actually accepting it. We worked out we could have three in the shop at a time.”
Mr Diamond said he particularly noticed fewer children and young people in the town.
“I would have had a lot of young ones going to school, going to youth club,” he said.
“All that has stopped. There only seem to be a few people hanging about the shopping centres.”
Mr Diamond said he had been fortunate to see his business pick up. And he put this partly down to customers’ reluctance to queue in larger shops.
“We’re getting our normal day business in the shop in a shorter day.”
He added: “So far so good”.
“People are falling back into their habits. I would be selling a few more newspapers, maybe I’m bucking the trend. People don’t want to go and stand in a supermarket and wait on their papers. We’ve seen an increase in our papers, and our magazines as well.”
The businessman is one of a decreasing number of traditional newsagents who have built their shops around selling newspapers.
“I’ve always set myself up as a newsagent,” he said.
“There’s not many of us left. There was a time when everything was sold around news but nowadays the lottery is important. We would do a powerful lot of lottery and scratch cards. They are big lines. Scratch cards came back very big.
“Since we came back lottery and scratch cards have held up well. Again, maybe people don’t want to queue for 15 or 20 minutes to buy a scratch card.”
He said no government body had contacted him with coronavirus advice.
“I went on what I thought was best,” he said.
“To be truthful and honest I did talk to the Public Health (Agency) about how many I should have in the shop. I sought advice.
“But as for somebody coming to give me advice, that didn’t happen.
“The public have this perception that people are leading us and telling us what to do…basically and truthfully there is no one offering any great lead.”
Asked what hopes he had for the future, he said he wanted the pandemic to prompt the government to try and rejuvenate town centres.
“I remember Maggie Thatcher having an inquiry into what happened to the high street. That was years ago,” he said.
“A lot of people think the high street has changed but I always think the high street changed when planners built houses on the outskirts of towns and took the living out of towns.
“(They need) to bring the living back into towns, and they need to look at it with an urgency. Truthfully, planners back in the 1960s and 1970s built the likes of Ballykeel and Dunclug and Doury Road or Ballee housing estate two or three miles out of the town. And that happened across Britain.”
