Moving out of the fast lane

Moving house can be a difficult time for families, but when the new house is in the country away from familiar city streets, the move can have a profound effect on family life, writes SHEILA WAYMAN

YEARS BEFORE I became a parent, I remember being in Schull in west Cork one sunny September morning watching children running around a wide-open school playground that overlooked the spectacular Atlantic coast.

Those beautiful surroundings seemed such a contrast to the cramped, concrete yards where their peers were spending break time in inner city Dublin. It was obvious the rural environment would give these children a head start in developing into contented adults.

Of course, life is not that simple. And where you raise your children depends on circumstances dictated by jobs, housing, transport and the pull of familiar surroundings.

While many of us city dwellers might dream of a quieter life in the country, relatively few will make it happen – or, indeed, really want all it entails. What persuades people to make the leap and what effect does it have on their children?

Catherine and Rob Buckley were expecting their second child when they decided to leave their native Dublin. Their daughter, Alannah, had been going to a creche from 7am-7pm each weekday since she was two-and-a-half months old, as Catherine was teaching in Portobello College, more than an hour’s commute from their home in Portmarnock, Co Dublin.

“We decided we could not live like that anymore,” says Catherine. Rob, an engineer, looked for a new job and found one in Tullamore, Co Offaly.

They had no links with the area but were intent on getting out of the city for the sake of the children and for a better pace of life. However, making the move was not without its problems and people thought they were mad.

“The shock horror that we were going to live in Co Offaly was visible on everybody’s faces. It would have been easier if we had announced we were going to Australia.”

When their second child, Finn, was three months old, the Buckleys rented out their house in Dublin and bought a second house near Rhode. “We moved just as the market started to crumble – a month or two later we would not have got a mortgage,” says Catherine.

It was summertime and idyllic at first. “Come September it just started to rain and never stopped. I had always worked and was home with Alannah – away from family and friends, very isolated. It was difficult to come to terms with that.”

The saving grace was that they were only an hour’s drive from Dublin, and Catherine could go up at weekends to shop and see her mother. “It was difficult. My husband was working and so he made friends – he found it a little easier.”

Within days of moving, the couple saw changes in Alannah. “She suffered with night terrors for the first couple of years of her life, but when we moved here, within a week, they had stopped.” However, Catherine acknowledges it may well be a coincidence as it is something children grow out of.

The little girl quickly became more confident and better able to cope with everyday things. “In cities, I think we overwhelm children with our anxieties, ‘Stay beside me, hold my hand . . .’ We don’t have that ‘stranger danger’ going on down here. It is a tiny place and you know everybody and everybody knows you.”

Once Alannah, who is now aged six, started school, Catherine found it easier to meet other parents and assimilate into the community, where initially she had found people guarded and slow to adjust to newcomers. She has also started a home-based business, Mór Foods, making jams, chutneys and dressings to supply to delicatessens and restaurants.

Three years on, Catherine no longer feels the need to go to Dublin, and friends and family are more inclined to come down and visit them. “We absolutely love it now and would never move back to the city.”

Paul McDermott and his wife, Anne Parle-McDermott, pictured above, made a similar move out of the capital with their two children this summer. He is on a career break from the genetics department of Trinity College Dublin, after 22 years working there as a technician, to look after Ciara (eight) and Fionn (three) in their new home outside Ballyhale, in Co Kilkenny.

“If you said to me a year ago I would be doing this, I would have said I’d like to be doing it but I can’t see myself doing it . . .” says Paul.

However, over-stretched finances became the tipping point in their aspiration for a better quality of family life.

“Rather than be a victim of circumstances we decided to try to come up with a solution and this is what we went for,” he explains.

Like most working parents, they had found daily life one long rush – from getting the children out in the morning and commuting to work, to returning home in the evening to negotiate homework, dinner and bedtime. What’s more, having lived in Blanchardstown since they got married, they were not happy with the way the area was going.

In 2008, they had bought a two-bedroom home in rural Co Kilkenny, the county of Anne’s birth. They saw it as a place to spend weekends and, in the long term, perhaps somewhere to retire to.

Very soon afterwards they were hit by the public service pay cuts. It meant a 15 per cent drop in salary for both Paul and Anne, a lecturer in DCU’s School of Biotechnology. Bills began to mount up.

“We were not able to keep two houses going, along with the childcare costs,” says Paul. “It got to the stage where you were in negative equity going to work. It made more sense for one of us to stay at home and just have one house.”

They knew it would be very difficult to sell their house in Kilkenny and, anyway, they wanted a better quality of family life. Last Christmas they decided to jump: sell their Dublin home and start a new life in Ballyhale. Paul took the career break while Anne commutes to DCU, currently staying over in Dublin – with Paul’s mother in Cabra – just one night a week.

Three months into his new role as stay-at-home father, Paul says: “I am only starting to learn now as a parent. I am working on my patience skills!”

For him, the hectic early years of fatherhood coincided with part-time work on a PhD, which took seven years to complete. “I have to admit I felt I was physically at home but my mind was somewhere else.

“I was snatching at things a lot. I remember when Anne was giving birth, I couldn’t stop thinking about what I was going to write in chapter five of the thesis!”

The children settled quickly into their new home. They like having space and not feeling so confined.

“My daughter in particular loves the school and has made some really nice friends. We are integrating into the community, particularly through the children.” Fionn has just started Montessori.

Paul thinks the local children seem happier and less restricted than their peers in Dublin. “It may be a more relaxed attitude overall which goes down from the parents to the children. They just want to have a bit of fun – not in a vindictive kind of way, just to be happy.”

He sees the benefit of being able to do homework with Ciara. “It gives her a bit of confidence when she goes to school that her homework is done and she is up to speed with her subjects.

“In Dublin, I only did it half-heartedly. You were relying on the childminder and they did their best, but it is probably the responsibility of the parent.”

Ciara has got involved locally in camogie, basketball and athletics. “We can get to these things and do these things whereas in Dublin we did not have time to do them.

“You don’t have the rushing and the madness here. In Dublin, if there were queues in a shop you would be getting agitated because you had to go somewhere. Here you don’t think like that.”

The only thing that stresses Paul now is cutting the grass. “We have two-thirds of an acre. If it rains I get a bit peeved because I can’t cut the grass.

“At the weekends we can do things as a family and go places. Time is not as compressed. It is amazing when you have more time to spend with the children, the quality things shine through.”

He feels family life is more balanced, with one parent focusing on the children and home, and the other focusing on the job. What’s more, he adds: “Financially we are better off on one salary – as mad as it may seem.”

A NEW LIFE: ‘IN RURAL IRELAND, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A BAD ADDRESS’

The best advice for parents considering a move to rural Ireland is to do it when the children are very young, so they can settle, says David Balfe. He and his wife, Claire, moved from west Dublin to west Clare in 2005 with their two teenage sons, under the programme run by Rural Resettlement Ireland (RRI). The transition was difficult with children that age.

“They did not believe we were moving until the removal truck showed up. We had involved them in the whole process, but at the end of the day they were teenagers – they see only their own little world.”

Claire, who is from Cork, and David, a Dubliner who had been in the Naval Service, were used to moving around and were quite adaptable.

But it was a huge culture shock for two adolescents who had lived all their lives in Corduff, an area of west Dublin, where the National Aquatic Centre was close by, McDonalds down the road and plenty of cinemas, shops and friends within easy reach.

“They moved down to complete and utter isolation as far as they were concerned. Nothing to do – they could not even play football. It is all GAA down here.”

Living five miles outside Kilkee, the teenagers had also lost their independence. They were dependent on their parents for lifts everywhere.

“I did take them fishing and tried to start things we didn’t do up there, but it was a struggle.”

However, David believes their sons, “despite themselves”, benefited from the move. “They had a chance to finish school and they did not end up with police records or in trouble with drugs.”

RRI has helped more than 700 families move from urban areas since it was set up 20 years ago . It assists mainly people living in local authority estates.

The educational outlook for children can be transformed when these families move. They are not only much more likely to achieve the Leaving Certificate, but also to progress to third level.

“In Dublin your address is often the key to whether or not you end up in third-level education or whether you get a job,” says Jim Connolly, founder and chairman of RRI. “In rural Ireland, there is no such thing as a bad address.”

The peer influence is also of huge importance in education and is very different in rural areas.

“All the kids get on the bus and go to second level; there is no class distinction – it doesn’t exist among rural families. When they finish second level, the peer influence is to go on to third level, therefore their whole life changes,” Connolly adds.

The Balfes reckon if they had remained where they were, chances are their sons “would have got mixed up in all sorts of stuff, considering the friends they had and the type of area we were living in. It is highly unlikely they would have been able to resist all of that stuff at that age.”

However, David believes the two lads are left with a sense of displacement. They both live away from home now – the eldest, who is 20, is at college in Thurles, while his 18-year-old brother is on a Fás course in Ennis.

David does not think they will ever return to live in west Clare. “They see this place as a kind of ‘when all else fails, it is somewhere to put my head down’. There is nothing here for them.”

Even school leavers from the area don’t stay, he says. “It is one of the flaws of the rural resettlement programme,” he suggests. “You move kids down here and then they have to move away.”

In the future, David hopes his sons will see the benefits of coming to Clare and thank them for it, realising how it took them away from an environment which had the potential to ruin their lives.

“I know myself, up in that area it only takes one kind of collision with the wrong type of guy and the wrong type of family and their life would be made very miserable after that.”