Postmaster Billy Cameron retires after three decades

From this week’s Galway City Tribune – An unusual quirk in the design of Number 12 Lower Newcastle – Billy Cameron’s home that adjoins the local Post Office – is that there are two front doors, and the newer exterior one opens outward rather than inward.

That was a security measure added in the 2000s after postmaster Billy was targeted by a thief one Friday evening after shutting the Post Office.

“There was a knock on the door, and a fella stood in front of me with a balaclava and a gun. It was possibly fake but . . . He said ‘open the safe’,” recalls Billy.

“I bluffed my way out of it. I suspected immediately who it was. He was local and he was on substances. I told him ‘we don’t keep money since the robbery. The only money here is what’s in my wallet’. I took out the wallet, had €100 in it, and he took it and scampered across into the university.”

Billy didn’t get away so lightly in the previous robbery that he had mentioned to the thief.

It was between Christmas and New Year, 2002, when the Post Office was raided by a gang while Billy was staying the night with his father in Oranmore.

A five-figure sum of cash was stolen from one of two safes in the building, which was recovered ripped open at a quarry up the bog road near Bearna Golf Club.

“They had the suspects, they knew who did it, but couldn’t prosecute. Gardaí got some cash back. I had to pay the difference [to An Post]. It was like a second mortgage,” he says.

Those were different times. Nowadays, that amount of money would not be kept overnight in the Post Office. And there is better security too, with CCTV cameras, alarms and more modern, secure time-lock safes.

The job has changed in other ways, too, during Billy’s time working in the Post Office, initially under his father.

This is a shortened preview version of this article. To read more of Billy’s story, see this week’s Galway City Tribune. You can buy a digital edition HERE.