COMMUTER COUNTIES/WICKLOW: Blessington offers a peaceful village lifestyle to disenchanted urban dwellers, but it's not all rural bliss, writes Kathy Sheridan.
If your objective is to make a financial killing, Blessington is probably not for you. Close enough to Dublin to fall within the city bus service, just 13 miles from Tallaght and 20 minutes from Naas, this is no pioneering trip into the great rural unknown, and house prices reflect that.
But there is something about it that draws on everyone's romantic notion of village life. The lakes and mountains are a short skip down winding, country roads. There is an old-fashioned friendliness around the streets, the shops and the Downshire hotel. The sense of community is actively cultivated by natives and many newcomers.
In December, Paul O'Hare moved here from Tallaght, with his wife, Clodagh, and three-year-old daughter, Lauren. "The house in Tallaght was nice but in the wrong place - too close to trouble," he says. "I've seen children who got into crime and you felt they never got a chance. I don't want my child to think we didn't give her a chance."
A car-hire worker at Dublin Airport, he starts at dawn and finishes at 2 p.m. Clodagh drops Lauren to Sakura, the local crèche, en route to work in the Cookstown Industrial Estate, and he collects her on his way home.
"The quality of life here is off the scale compared with Dublin," he says.
"I'd never go back. Take last Friday. We jumped into the car and in five to 10 minutes were at the lakes."
They love being able to walk to the pubs; the sense of community - "We get a newsletter through the door every week" - the sense of friendliness and, above all, the sense of safety. "It's the only place I see where the Garda station closes at weekends and opens again on Monday morning," he laughs incredulously. "But I've yet to see an incident, a fracas, an argument, that suggests we need it then."
Lesley and Matt Delaney moved six months ago, selling their terraced Clondalkin home for €161,000 and buying the fully-furnished Haywood showhouse - a four-bed semi with "huge" garden - for €260,000. "We're comfortable," says Lesley. "Between what we made on our last house and what we were able to put towards the new one, our mortgage certainly hasn't doubled." She works in Volvo Ireland's corporate sales department in Tallaght and gets to work in 30 minutes.
She, too, feels they have found a real community. "Within the first week, we had a chap calling to make sure we were getting the newsletter. Both churches dedicate a welcome night for each of the estates and representatives call together to the houses."
Lisa Charles, a young wife, mother and photographer from Blessington, is acutely conscious of the need to maintain the old sense of community. "Many of the people who commute miss out on a lot that goes on. But if you keep them informed about things like keep-fit and aerobics, it encourages them to participate."
Ruairi Ó hÁilín and his wife, Sharon O'Brien, both IT specialists, moved here from Bray. For Ruairi, the downside is the commute to Leopardstown, which on a good day takes 50 minutes, and on a bad one could take 90. Sharon, a translation linguist involved in software development, reckons the environment is good for their little boy. "There are kids next door, safe estates, and they're within walking distance of school and the shops in town."
However, if all this suggests undiluted rural bliss, it is not the whole picture. Blessington, like so many others, is on a cusp.
Disastrous water quality in some estates, massive illegal dumping, the quarrying threat to Glen Ding wood, the bursting schools population, the slow, infrequent bus service, a sense of virtually unstoppable, unsustainable development - all conspire to mar the idyllic image of rural life.
Many are forced to buy all their water or keep containers in the car boot for filling on visits to obliging friends and relatives. One mother, fresh from a town where the school had 25 children to a class, found 48 in her daughter's class in Blessington. The resource teacher is forced to give her sensitive, one-to-one tuition in a narrow corridor.
GAA and soccer coaching facilities and volunteers are stretched to breaking point. On Saturdays, buses to Tallaght and the city are packed with teenagers seeking diversions unavailable near home, while adults head for Naas to do the weekly shopping.
For an otherwise happy Sharon O'Brien, the environmental situation has been "the biggest disappointment . . . The appeal of Blessington is that it is still quite a rural place, and you still have these lovely images of fields and sheep. Yet suddenly, you're hearing of illegal dumps, water contamination, people wanting to dig out the beauty around you for commercial benefit, and there is talk of radon gas."
Frank Corcoran, president of An Taisce, chairman of the Blessington Heritage Trust and a local resident and activist for 13 years, notes Blessington was never meant to be a growth centre; the council simply ignored the spatial planning guidelines. The result is that the population, already doubled, is set to double again. An enormous multi-use development will house much of that growth, and significantly alter the commercial town centre.
But, as Corcoran points out with some pride, the Blessington Forum has not been sitting on its hands. Significant and valuable concessions have been wrung from the developers, including: a 200-seat theatre, a pitch-and-putt course, tennis and bowling greens, a central rendezvous for older people, some underground parking and a 40-acre public park - and all development will be phased. The theatre, for instance, has to come before the houses.
Meanwhile, other battles continue: Glen Ding remains a live issue, and there are campaigns for segregated cycle-ways and the full integration of the proposed affordable housing. Blessington is in for an interesting decade.
