A slighly different perspective
James,
Paul has given you a good and accurate rundown of the machines, now to put it a little more into context. I grew up and lived in Nortern Ireland between 1960 (I was actually born in England) and 1986 - so I lived through the "window" we are currently looking at.
In purely ecomonic terms NI was somewhat behind the UK mainland in terms of growth and ecomonic oppertunity - partly through its historical background and partly through being located in the top corner of another country.
It was my IMPRESSION when I visited Eire many times in the early to mid-1980s that, AT THAT TIME, ecomonic growth was somwhat behind that of the UK. Now James, you being from Donegal are in a bit of an unusual situation in being geographically closer to NI than the rest of the country so my guess is that Donegal itself would have been somewhere between the two.
Now, I can only speak of my recollections of what I saw at that time, In NI.
As I say, NI was somewhat behind mainland UK, but in the 1960s Twin tubs had pre-eminence although there were automatics around - I am aware of several owners of slant front keymatics and I know for sure of one early EE Liberator. However it seems to me, after reading many of teh Which reports for that era that the brands on sale tended to be dominated by the big three - Hoover, Hotpoint & Servis - and Rolls while they existed to a greater extent than on the mainland. I clearly remember pretty much all of their models coming onto the market up to around 1980 of so.
That is not to say of course that there were NO other machines on sale, just that they were in even smaller numbers - for example I know of examples of Bendix wide bodied machines (many more of the later autowashers from 1974 onwards though), Colston washer dryer (with the big door on it - was that the dryer?) and Philips Slimline machines. From the mid-1970s Zanussi appeared and made fasr inroads into teh market.
So to answer your question, yes they were on sale in NI at least, although I would say in porportionally lower volumes, given that the market was not so ecomonically advanced. And I guess similar for the Republic although again rather less so than the UK. And not just the Keymatic - the Hotpoint 1600 was on sale too - I rembember it, I saw it.
Al
