Roll on the happy campers

With the freedom to go where you want and eat when you like, you can't beat a holiday on wheels, say devotees. Niamh Kavanagh reports on the outwardly mobile.

Tom and Ann Tuite are perched on a cliff top, sipping a glass of cider at the little table beside their caravan. Children shriek with delight on the wide, honey-hued beach below, occasionally drowned out by Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh's melodious Kerry strains breaking through somebody's crackling radio to deliver the Dublin match in furious flow. It's a little overcast now after a brilliant morning, but still warm enough for Tom to sit without his shirt. In short, it's a perfect Irish summer day.

The seasoned caravanners are here in the north Dublin seaside town of Rush for a few days, staying in the small caravan and camping site run by the McNally family. The site is almost on the beach, just around the corner from a large thatched cottage.

Sporadic housing development pockmarks Rush; a sprawling Eurospar, a mobile phone outlet and a tiny Latvian grocery shop are the most visible signs of change in a town where the flow of traffic is still dictated by the pace of tractors.

The Tuites live in Donadea, Co Kildare, where Tom works in stud farm fencing and Ann works in Roche's pub. Every year, from St Patrick's Day on, they are on the road every other weekend until Hallowe'en, whatever the weather. They've been doing this for 35 years now, hitching their small caravan to the tow-bar of their car and touring around the country. They love the open road.

"You just take whatever you want to start you off and go. It's the freedom of it - the freedom to get up when you like, eat when you like, not to be confined to certain times for eating," says Tom.

The unpredictable Irish weather doesn't bother them in the least.

"You make the most of a good day, although this year has been fantastic. And with a caravan, you can sit in if it's raining whereas in a B&B you've nowhere to go, you've to be out in the morning."

They go to different places every year but have a few favourite haunts, such as Rush, where they stay for short weekends or bank holidays, and Clonakilty in west Cork for longer spells.

In the days before they owned a caravan, they used to rent a mobile home. To caravanners, that is quite a difference as, despite their name, mobile homes are fixed to sites permanently.

The Tuites were smitten with the travelling lifestyle when they borrowed caravan belonging to Tom's boss and spent two weeks in Lahinch, Co Clare. They bought a caravan a few years later, "a real old Freedom caravan" and gradually moved up a little.

The outdoor life was a great adventure for their four sons, the youngest of whom is now 17. The boys used to sleep in a tent outside the caravan.

The couple bought their current caravan three years ago for about €16,000 with a trade-in. Inside it's a bit like a boat, with nooks and crannies for all sorts, and lots of things with more than one function, such as the sofas that fold down into beds. There's a shower and toilet operated by filling a tank with about 30-40 litres of water. The Tuites also have television and radio. Site fees range from €17 to €28 a day, with electricity extra.

"Things are getting a little bit more expensive than it was but it's still worth it," says Tom. The Tuites eat out sometimes in restaurants but cook their own food most of their time, using their cooker rather than the barbecues that have become so popular. They go to local pubs for a drink and Ann raves about the local theatre in Rush.

Although they love the caravan lifestyle, they also holiday abroad, usually twice a year, where they live a slightly more lavish existence, staying in hotels and dining out.

The Tuites' caravan may be smart and spanking new, but it is dwarfed by the adjacent mammoth tourer vans, also referred to as motor homes. The turnover in McNallys' two-star park is phenomenal as people come and go every day, cycling out from the airport with tents, or sometimes arriving in the middle of the night. Many Italians, French, Dutch, Germans and Americans drive swish, high-tech tourer vans or motor homes, as they are called. The tourer vans are equipped with kitchens, showers and bathrooms.

"There's some serious looking ones," says site owner Stephen McNally. "Last year, we had one in that cost half a million. The couple were doing a tour of Europe and they were in Ireland for six months."

The site also caters for 40 mobile homes, or "statics", as Stephen dubs them.

Life among the "statics" is easy-going and carefree. Everybody knows everybody else, people pop in next door for a chat or a cup of tea on the veranda. Some people come every weekend, others are here for the entire summer, like retired couple Austin and Phyllis Cunningham from Leixlip, Co Kildare, who used to have a tourer, and whose daughter, Vanessa, and her partner, Dermot, also own a mobile home and spend every weekend until the end of October in their "home from home".

Their friend, Tommy Moore from Ballyfermot, who now lives in Leixlip - just 40 minutes away - enjoys the lifestyle so much he commutes to his work as an operations manager in a binding factory every day, while his wife and three children spend most of the time on the beach.

"We all cook dinners between two or three mobiles. Someone would do spuds, someone else would do salads, whatever," he says. "It's great for the kids. The beach is great and there's a lifeguard there for the summer.

"They're playing till 11.30 at night but they're not out of the park, they're running around between mobiles. It's safe."

"There's never any hassle on the site," says McNally, although this year they installed CCTV "because everybody else has it" and two years ago they erected an electronic gate.

Not that there's much chance of trouble anyway because McNally lives on the site all year round in a luxury mobile home beside his parents, who live in another "static". His father, Tony, speaks French and German, an asset as the majority of people touring are from those countries.

Tourer vans are big business. Last year, Irish Ferries carried 8,000 motor homes and 3,000 caravans on its British and French crossings.

There are some 190 caravan and camping parks in the State that can accommodate tourer vans. These are accredited with Fáilte Ireland and are given ratings up to four stars, depending on the facilities provided, which can range from TV and laundry rooms to restaurants and tennis courts.

The remainder of caravan parks cater solely for mobile homes and are registered with local councils.

Mobile homes are becoming ever more luxurious. En-suite bedrooms, central heating, showers, satellite TV - it's light years from the type of holiday Kathleen Murray (77) from Raheny in Dublin remembers when she began staying in one of Ireland's first caravan parks, Ireton's in Courtown Harbour, Co Wexford, 30 or so years ago.

Back then, there were no toilets in the caravans, just an outside toilet block, no running water and no electricity, just gas lights. She bought two caravans for £600.

"There was an outside tap where young fellas would be washing their hair one minute and then somebody would arrive to wash the cabbage for the dinner," she says with a laugh. "Courtown was just a little village then."

The mother of 11 reared her youngest children on summers in the resort while her late husband, Ned, visited at weekends off from his job in B&I.

"Nan Ireton used to leave a sack of potatoes outside my door as a welcoming gesture," she recalls fondly. "She knew I had a lot of children to feed."

Murray's 33 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren are all frequent visitors to the resort now. A giant Dublin flag flaps in a gentle breeze outside her immaculate mobile, surrounded by a small garden and a garland of flowers.

Kathleen spends much of her days sitting outside, chatting to the many friends she has made over the years.

Owner Benny Ireton marvels at such changes. His parents, Tommy and Nan, set up the park in 1943 when they allowedday-trippers, or "bathers" as they are still known in Wexford parlance, to camp out on their small farm near the harbour. The caravan park evolved from that.

"People used to come in home-made caravans, put them on wheels or a trailer and leave them here," recalls Benny. "Then people brought trams and stayed in those. Then Irish companies began to manufacture mobile homes and caravan parks took off." Now there is just one indigenous firm, Roadmaster, still producing mobiles. Today, Ireton's is one of many mobile home sites in Courtown Harbour. There is no camping any more, everybody owns their mobiles and pays an annual site fee of €1,700. There is no sub-letting either.

"Years ago, people sub-let because they didn't have the money to pay the ground rent and a few weeks renting out their caravan would cover it. Now people pay a lot of money for their mobiles and they want to keep them right," says Benny's son, Tom.

Despite the wide availability of cheap, foreign holidays, and the huge increase in holiday homes around the coastline, many caravan parks are still busy.

However people tend to go abroad every year as well as spending the summer in their mobiles or caravans. But perhaps it is the mobile holiday memory that they will cherish most.

"A lot of people have childhood memories of holidays in mobiles. They'll remember that - a house wouldn't have a holiday feeling about it," says Tom.