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Ireland

Everywhere I have ever lived – 1995-1998


Posted in: Dublin, Princess

With some trepidation, I moved back to Dublin.  I needn’t have worried, I found it a much more welcoming town than I had done when I was a poor student.  It was much better being a poor young professional.  God, I was so skint.  I can remember going for coffee and only having water because it was two days to payday.

I lived with (just with, not with) a lovely man who was immensely house proud.  We were happy together for two years but when he upbraided me for chopping a tomato on his draining board, I knew our ways had to part despite his very beautiful and conveniently located house.  I then moved into a colleague’s old house and had a scarlet bedroom and a bracing cycle to work along the sea front.

After a couple of years, the office wanted to second someone to Brussels and a colleague and partner in poverty (we drank tap water together two days before pay day) encouraged me to apply with the words “you have to – look at the pay”.  This turned out to be unfortunate for him in the short term as I got the job and he did not but now he has a very important job so all is well in a cosmic karmic way.

Tomorrow – Brussels II

Today – some confusion

Princess (looking at a map): What does NL stand for?

Me: The Netherlands where the Dutch Mama and her family live.

Princess: And where Peter Pan took Wendy so that she would never grow up.

Everywhere I have ever lived – 1993


Posted in: Dublin, Travel

Once I qualified, I passed over the opportunity to work in an Irish country town and moved to Rome.

I shared a rather nice ground floor flat in Trastevere with two Danish girls and I thought that they were extremely exotic.  I was disappointed when they moved out and a Dutch girl moved in – so much less thrilling.  However, I had my ancient moped and enjoyed whizzing round Rome on it.  I thought that I was fabulous circling the Colosseum – you know, Roman Holiday and all that.

In other news at mass this morning we had this reading from the book of proverbs.  Note to self, get busy with wool and flax.  Then the gospel was the one about the talents which is the Bible’s clearest endorsement of capitalism.  Not, perhaps, a particularly uplifting set of readings though I was glad to be reminded of where one of my favourite lines comes from: the servant who makes nothing gets thrown “out into the dark, where there will be weeping and grinding of teeth”.  I was also delighted to see, from my internet research, that verses 10-31 of the proverbs reading are “an acrostic, each verse beginning with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet.”  I knew you would like to know.

Everywhere I have ever lived – 1992


Posted in: Ireland

I spent a couple of months in a small town a long way from Cork at the request of the managing partner.  I wouldn’t say I regret it precisely but I would say that a) there is not a lot to do in small Irish towns in winter and b) however pleasant he and his family may be, it’s probably not a good idea to live with your boss.

Tomorrow – Rome.

Everywhere I have ever lived – 1991


Posted in: Dublin, Ireland, Travel

It is distressing but I am a little hazy about the details of when I moved to Dublin to study.  I was only there for a couple of months and I thought it was cold, gloomy and dull.

This impression may have been reinforced by my accommodation.  My friend and I had inveigled our way into a short term let by assuring the landlord that we were nurses (a profession which he appeared to regard as entirely trustworthy).  The place where we were living had been inexpertly divided into flats.  We had a main room which boasted a calor heater as its sole source of heat and a carpet as old as time.

We shared a bedroom which had no source of heating at all.  It gets quite cold in Dublin in winter.  We bought a portable heater.  Despite the fact that it got quite warm (I accidentally melted my doc martin’s on it), the room remained arctic.

Our friendship was brought under severe strain by my friend’s chronic lateness.  She was not an early riser and she could not get out of bed.  We were on the same course and, the organisers, having made a very accurate assessment of the enthusiasm levels of trainee solicitors, kept an attendance register and, if you were late or did not attend, your master would be told and, worse, you would have to travel to Dublin to repeat the day.  This made me extremely keen to get there on time.  Every morning, F. would get up late as I paced up and down.  Then while I stood whining in the doorway, she would painstakingly lace up her 18 hole doc’s.  Then we would cycle like the wind and arrive, panting, just in time.

After those months together, I think we might both have liked a break but, unfortunately, we had already bought tickets to go interrailing together for a month which we did with almost no sulking except for that time when we were looking for the pantheon and I took us outside the city walls in Rome based on my expert powers of navigation.

Everywhere I have ever lived – 1980-1989


Posted in: Cork, Family, Ireland

Despite visiting almost every other house for sale in Cork, my parents eventually decided to return to the Edwardian semi-detatched house.  They cleared up after the tenants who were dreadful and decided to extend.

My father’s cousin’s husband the architect was asked for advice and he provided a very elaborate, very expensive and very beautiful plan.  In the end, largely on grounds of cost, they went for something rather plainer which was stigmatised as being like a bowling alley by the architect.  Ironically, the builder’s cost overrun (100%) was such that my parents could easily have afforded to buy a much larger house and not bothered with the extension.

Unsurprisingly, when we moved in, the builders were still in residence and spent much of that fine autumn in our back garden, drinking tea and playing cards while my mother cooked on a camping stove.

Though I am very fond of the house now (it is where my parents still live and my favourite aunt lives next door), I did not like it when we moved there first (the favourite aunt only moved in some years after us).  It was small and poky (though positively palatial compared to our current house) and we had too much furniture.  We marvelled at my mother’s revelation that the last family to live there had had 6 children and no extension (something that no longer stretches credibility).

This was not the least of my misery, I was paired with a very bossy girl for cookery class and my sponge failed to rise.  My father refused to take out a mortgage to cover the cost of the extension; he is not a big believer in debt.  Throughout the 1980s he lay awake worrying about the enormous national debt (turns out he was right, the IMF was hovering on the doorstep).  He was not going to add to the problem.  He took out a short term loan.  For the five years after we moved in, money was for the first time in my parents’ lives, and certainly the first time in mine, tight.  This was largely due to my father’s insistence on paying back the entire cost of the wretched extension over the shortest possible period at the highest imaginable rate (I now believe that this is very admirable but I was not entirely convinced at the time).

For my confirmation, I desperately wanted a particular dress.  It was very expensive and my mother promised to make me an identical one.  But it was not identical and I was unhappy.  My mother’s constant refrain was “for every pound you spend, your father has to earn three”  (in fact that was only at the marginal rate but still 65% tax is 65% tax). This made for frugal years.  It had a lasting effect on my sister who was at an impressionable age and she is still a big believer in savings.

The transition from primary school, where I was very happy, to secondary school, where I most emphatically was not, was very difficult for me.  My mother was anxious to sympathise but as former star pupil, head girl and captain of the hockey team in her own school, she was singularly ill-equipped to do so. Unfortunately, this transition also coincided with leaving the house I loved, a sustained and surprising burst of poverty and, when we had just about got over the poverty, my father’s heart surgery.

My father had heart surgery in late 1985.  At that time there were no such operations in Cork and my mother had to spend a great deal of time in Dublin.  He was very sick, I now realise but at the time, I couldn’t help but be bitter that he had chosen to be sick the Christmas before I was to sit my leaving certificate (in retrospect, my school may have had an undue emphasis on the importance of examinations).  Also, I was mortified that my mother made me ask the nuns in school to pray for him.  I dutifully did though which shows I may have had the vaguest inkling of how sick he was.

In 1986, I finished school and went to college. I continued to live in my parents house where I was now, very, very happy.   We were rich (relatively) again, my father was well again and I was in mixed classes for the first time since kindergarten.  I lived happily in my parents house throughout my college career except for a couple of breaks living elsewhere which I will come to tomorrow.  Possibly.

Dirty old town


Posted in: Dublin, Ireland

A little break from the houses.
I have now been back in Ireland for three months.  We’re settling in, I suppose.

Dublin is a funny place.  I left it before I had children and it is very different to live somewhere with children.  I have found that Dublin is not the big city I thought it was when I lived here last.  It is dozens of small communities sitting, somewhat reluctantly, under the umbrella title of city.  Dubliners like to live near where they grew up.  Very near.  As in around the corner.   This makes it surprisingly intimate for a city with a population of over a million.

I have been shocked by the very visible poverty I have witnessed on the streets of Dublin.  It’s rough despite a sustained economic boom in Ireland over the last ten years.  There are drug addicts roaming the streets high as kites during the day.  There are many people who seem to have fallen through the net.  At the tram stop there are young fit men regularly aggressively begging from unfortunate tourists.   There are mad people everywhere, stomping, screaming, gesturing.  In Temple Bar the other day, I saw a teenager stamp on a pigeon with a damaged wing.

Then there is a lot of money.  I have been amazed by the number of behemoth SUVs which now block the (small) streets of Dublin.  House prices may be falling but small suburban homes are still selling for over a million euros.  I was in the IFSC recently and I was astounded by the offices I visited.  They were far more impressive than any I have visited in Brussels (though the place did seem to be run by 22 year old accountants, much in the way that the European Parliament on Fridays appears to be run exclusively by young women wearing crop tops).    From the top floor, as far as the eye could see, all the way to the Dublin mountains, there were cranes, building, building, building.  It was hard to believe that this recession thing will ever really take off.

Yet surrounding the IFSC is one of the very poorest parts of Dublin, the North inner city.  This rising tide does not appear to have lifted all boats.   The surrounding squalor, poverty and deprivation present a very stark contrast to the sleek premises in the IFSC.  Someone told me that Belgium has one of the smallest poverty gaps in the EU and Ireland one of the widest.  This definitely feels true but I just looked it up on the internet and it isn’t.  Nevertheless, there is a very visible gap in Dublin; perhaps it is just perception.  Or perhaps, Dublin does not reflect the national trend (certainly, I do not feel that there is the same visible deprivation in Cork).

For a little balance, I thought that you might like to know some of the good things about my adopted town as well.  After all, I have chosen to live the rest of my life here, so I must believe it has some merit.

Dublin enjoys a beautiful situation.  From all sorts of unlikely places in the city (including our back garden) you can get views of the Dublin mountains.  It is on the sea, unlike Cork which, alas, is on an estuary which is really not the same thing at all.

It is composed of several charming little towns, swallowed up by Dublin but still enjoying much of their own character.  The centre of the city is compact and, in places, remarkably handsome.  My father always said that Dublin is like any city in the North of England.  There is some truth in that but, as a capital, it enjoys many more splendid buildings than, say, Manchester.

Irish people are friendly.  It is still true and they tend to be indulgent to children and happy to talk to strangers.  Initially, when people addressed me I would often think (rather frantically) “do I know you?” but I’m used to it again now and I love it.

Dublin is very buzzy.  Recession or no recession, the streets are full of people talking and laughing well into the night.  During the day time, the place is heaving.  And demographics are in Ireland’s favour, still.  There are lots of young people and they add a certain rakish excitement to the mix.  And there are whole new immigrant communities – this is a much more heterogeneous Dublin than the one I left.  This is a very different Ireland; when I was in school there was a girl in our class whose mother was from Dublin, this was so exotic that it got an article in the Evening Echo entitled, if memory serves me “Cork girl moves to Dublin”.  Well, we’ve moved on a lot from then, even Cork people are less insular.

Also on the pluses, it’s very easy to reach Cork by train from Dublin.