My Journey

Petrol for the motorbike costs me £30 a week. Add that up and you're paying an extra £120 a month on top of your cheaper house. We moved three years ago from Lucan. We paid £82,000 for a four-bedroom detached bungalow on a quarter of an acre in Castletown, seven miles from Arklow, just over the Co Wexford border. It was an opportunity to buy a very good house and we took it. It used to take me three-quarters of an hour to get into Dublin from Lucan. If I leave home on my bike at 7.30 a.m. I can be at work by about 8.50 a.m. The Glen of the Downs is always choc-a-block. There are many trucks on the road and it's very hard to pass. If you get caught behind a truck you've no chance of overtaking. Going by car, I'd want to leave around 6.30 a.m. or 6.40 to get into town for 9 a.m. I save up to an hour on the bike.

Just past the Tap pub, its single lane for several kilometres and you can't overtake. After that, you always get stuck at the Glen of the Downs and its bumper to bumper to the start of the Bray bypass. Then about a two-minute blast of speed and you're stuck again all the way to the Loughlinstown roundabout. The queues to the roundabout go back about a mile on a bad day. A lot of people are driving to Bray, parking there and getting the DART in. You'd have to get a DART from Bray at 8.15 a.m. to get to work by nine, so drivers have to be on the road from Arklow by 7 a.m.

The journey is definitely getting harder. Its a great place to live but its not easy. A big part of your life is spent on the road.

In an interview with Kate McMorrow