Down my way

I was born and reared on Quay Street in an old thatched house. We had a farm out on the Balbriggan Road and we kept hens and chickens, a few cows and pigs in the sheds at the back of the house. I used to help my mother with milking the cows and people came to the door for milk and buttermilk.

The land was sold when my father died and someone recently got a million for just one of the fields. Skerries has never been so well off. There are too many houses now - it is not the Skerries I knew growing up. It was a quiet place and a good life. Yet there was more to do then than there is now. There was a lovely dance hall, the Pavilion on South Strand and we went dancing at Red Island. When I left the Holy Faith Convent, I worked as a legal secretary in Dublin. Later, I worked in a local convalescent home.

Because I was an only child I went to live with my father when I married first. My husband Bernard died in a boating accident in 1970, seven years after we were married and I was left with five children under six. I married Sean three years later. He was a widower with a daughter of two and a half and then we had a son, John.

We took the thatch off the roof and utilised the loft to make room for the nine of us. Now you get a grant for thatching but it was hard to get straw then and thatches were expensive to keep.

There are so many new people coming to Skerries now, but it's still quiet enough. Where I live, I just have to walk across the road to the sea. I'll never leave Skerries - except in a box!