Happy at work? Apparently so. Ireland ranked an impressive second in this year’s Global Life-Work Balance Index, published by global HR solutions provider Remote. Then again, a survey by recruiter Hays Ireland also found that 61 per cent of professionals want to change jobs this year. If you’re part of this cohort, then take inspiration from these five individuals who, mid-career, packed in the 9-to-5 for their true calling. From IT to goldsmith, Meta to antiques dealer, scientist to schoolteacher each found a way to achieve true happiness at work.
‘I was more interested in people’s inner selves than fashion shows and beauty shoots’
Ellen MacDermott
Graphic designer turned psychotherapist
Ellen MacDermott had a fast-paced, creative and exciting career in her 20s. As the senior designer on fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar US, the now 31-year-old worked in the 46-storey, Norman Foster-designed Hearst Tower in Midtown Manhattan, frequently attending star-studded parties and regularly travelling to Paris fashion week.
To quote The Devil Wears Prada, “a million young girls would kill for this job”, and MacDermott’s story is not unlike that of Andy Sachs, the determined but conflicted second assistant to Runway editor-in-chief Miranda Priestly in the 2006 film. “The job was 24-7. You lived to work,” she says. “So I was always late for dinner parties and birthdays, bringing expensive gifts to make up for the fact that I had no time. I couldn’t hold down a boyfriend; any time I was on a date, I’d get a call to go back to the office to make changes to something.”
MacDermott was on a hamster wheel with no time to think or weigh up. “It was just go, go, go.” But February 2020 proved a pivotal month for the Dubliner. “I was in Paris at the Louvre and my work was part of an exhibition celebrating 150 years of Harper’s Bazaar. It was amazing. Then within a week, Covid hit and everything stopped. Suddenly, I was back in Dublin, living with my parents.”
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The dramatic change of scenery and pace forced her to slow down and consider her circumstances, and it was then she admitted to herself that there’d always been a faint whisper that she wasn’t on the right path. “I started doing a lot of therapy and realised I was more interested in people’s inner selves than fashion shows and beauty shoots. I wanted a more meaningful career, but I didn’t know what that looked like.”
A friend gave her a copy of The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, and that’s when MacDermott’s pivot from glossy magazines to therapy room truly began. She signed up for a four-year degree course in psychotherapy and is now a trainee psychotherapist in her final year at Dublin Business School.
“I’ve experienced the most bizarre turnaround in my life over the past three years. Everything has changed. I’ve become much closer to my family. I can maintain friendships, but I’ve also cut some friends loose – those who were only around because of my glamorous job,” she says.
“To be completely honest,” she adds, “I think I was only working in fashion publishing because of the way it was perceived and how it changed the way people saw me. I was the girl doing really well, being flown to Paris and attending Chanel fashion shows.”
MacDermott has no regrets about leaving the world of design and fashion. “I’ve traded an exciting career for something deeply fulfilling. Doing a job you truly feel aligned with trumps any glamour or financial gain,” she says. “I couldn’t be happier.”
‘I never once took a holiday where I wasn’t checking emails. Now I have freedom and flexibility and every day is different’
Kathleen Lonergan
Recruiter at Meta turned antiques dealer
If you’re an interior design enthusiast or a lover of antiques, you may well be familiar with @houseofklax on Instagram and its founder, Kathleen Lonergan. A picture of health and happiness as she enthusiastically showcases the vintage finds she sells through Instagram and her online store, Lonergan paints a very different picture of her life just three years ago.
An international recruitment leader at Meta, Lonergan’s professional life was a whirlwind of global travel, managing teams across multiple time zones and constant performance-related pressure. The 48-year-old, who worked in tech recruitment for 20 years, 12 of those at Meta, says she was constantly “on”. “I could have a call with Singapore at 7am and a call with the States at midnight the same day,” she says. “I was always online and always checking in on how my team was doing; I never once took a holiday where I wasn’t checking emails.”
Towards the end of her time at Meta, she suffered a series of health issues and the pressurised nature of the job meant she didn’t take the time she needed to get better. “I put myself in some tough situations at work. I remember on one occasion presenting to 300 people and feeling as if I was about to pass out.”
She took sick leave in 2022 and began contemplating what might come next. “I started thinking about what I wanted and what I didn’t want,” she explains. “I didn’t want multiple time zones, I didn’t want to be online all day and I didn’t want to manage teams. What I wanted was to slow down and do something on my own.”
She loved interior design and antiques, so she set up an Instagram page and soon the seed of an idea began to grow. “I already had a platform and I knew I could sell so I thought maybe I could share my passion for antiques online.” In a serendipitous turn of events, Lonergan was made redundant in 2023. Two years on, her online business is thriving and she feels better than ever. “This job has given me the time to get fully well. I’ve got my energy back and everything in my life is more balanced.”
There are many aspects of her new job that she loves. “I have freedom and flexibility and every day is different. I work to my own schedule and my husband and I can head off in our little camper van to the west of Ireland whenever we want to. But finding beautiful items for people who will treasure them is the best feeling in the world. One of my customers messaged me recently to say she’d put photographs of her husband and daughter in a locket she bought from me and she wears it when she’s having breast cancer treatment to give her strength. That blew me away.”
‘I was lucky that I had my brother’s encouragement and my wife’s willingness to take a leap of faith’
Barry McCaul
Big tech to goldsmith
Barry McCaul is the cofounder of McCaul Goldsmiths along with his brother David. While David followed a traditional path to goldsmithing, training at NCAD before working for luxury jewellery houses in London, Barry studied computer science and worked in IT in Belgium, Australia and Dublin with a brief stint as an academic at DCU. But for him, the substantial salary he was earning didn’t make up for the workplace politics, pressure and lack of creativity in big tech. “The phrase golden handcuffs really struck a chord with me at that time,” he says.
His wife, Claire, was aware he wasn’t happy and his brother constantly remarked on how stressed he seemed. So Barry and Claire made the drastic decision to leave their three-bedroom home outside Swords in Dublin and their well-paid jobs (Claire was a physiotherapist working at the Mater hospital) and move to a single room in a three-bedroom apartment in east London so Barry could set up a goldsmithing business with his brother.
“I’ve never been afraid of trading short-term comforts for longer-term gain,” he says. “But I was lucky that I had my brother’s encouragement and my wife’s willingness to take a leap of faith and put up with a complete change in lifestyle,” says the 48-year-old. He spent four months – and a substantial amount of their savings – on an intensive diamond-setting course in Antwerp before the couple rented out their house and moved across the water. Within nine months, the brothers had opened McCaul Goldsmiths in Exmouth Market.
He recalls many of his friends who had stayed at home working in IT telling him he was living the dream. “It was definitely a kind of dream,” he says, laughing, “but we were absolutely broke for the first few years.” The brothers recently opened a second atelier in Malahide in Dublin and are both living back in the community they grew up in. “In some respects I traded one stress for another, but I knew for definite very early on that I was so much happier working with Dave than I was in IT,” he says.
“When you’re self-employed, you’re either stressed because you’re busy or stressed because you’re not busy. But it’s not the kind of frustration you feel as an employee in a job that doesn’t make you happy. You’re the master of your own destiny. And that feels great.”
‘I used to be tired all the time, overworked. Now I walk five steps from our cottage to the gallery’
Liz Greehy
Journalist to gallery owner
“When you’re driven to work for yourself, I think you’re probably a bit of a workaholic,” says Liz Greehy. “That’s my problem, but now I’m working hard in a way that I enjoy and makes me feel fulfilled.” The 45-year-old is co-owner of contemporary art gallery Kilbaha Gallery on the Loop Head Peninsula in west Clare. Formerly a freelance journalist, Greehy wrote for a variety of magazines and local newspapers before launching Stylebible.ie, an online fashion magazine, in the early 2000s.
“Online magazines weren’t really a thing then so it gained all sorts of momentum really quickly,” she says. “Suddenly I was being asked to host events, judge fashion shows and beauty pageants and contribute to radio shows. It took me all over the country and all over Europe. It just snowballed.”
Eventually, the travelling started to take its toll and the job “began to feel a little hollow ... I felt I’d lost myself somewhere, and it left me re-evaluating everything,” she says. She stepped back from writing and travelling and spent time at home in Loop Head. “I came home and looked at what was right in front of me. There was so much creativity all around me here – I’d grown up immersed in the art world; my dad was a sculptor and my brother, Seamus, is a sculptor.”
They had some family land, so Greehy joined forces with Seamus’s wife, Ailish Connolly, who had a background in sales but also “a really natural eye for curation”, and they built Kilbaha Gallery from the ground up 11 years ago. She says the career change has made an extraordinary difference to her life. “I used to be tired all the time, overworked, and I wasn’t with my family or present in my community. Now, I walk five steps from our cottage to the gallery, my children have grown up running in and out of it and my free time is given to local development groups like Loop Head Together.”
She finds supporting Irish artists incredibly satisfying. “Shipping Irish art all over the world is wonderful and exciting and it’s a great feeling helping to connect people with lovely pieces of art.” She says she and Ailish work extremely hard because, with an online presence (kilbahagallery.com), the gallery never sleeps. “But we’re both very happy and being back in my local community makes me even happier still.”
‘I didn’t want to spend my life moving liquids from one tube to another’
Declan Cathcart
Research scientist turned secondary schoolteacher
After just two weeks covering a biology teacher’s maternity leave in a Kildare secondary school, Declan Cathcart contacted Trinity College about enrolling in its HDip (now the professional master in education or PME). Despite having spent more than a decade as a biotech research scientist in universities in the UK and Ireland with a stint working for large pharma companies, Cathcart says his love of secondary school teaching was immediate.
The 56-year-old, who teaches biology, maths and junior science at Temple Carrig School in Greystones, Co Wicklow, says he has never looked back since switching professions in the early noughties. “I don’t miss my lab life at all,” he says. “I love science and this job allows me to communicate and share ideas.”
Cathcart became disillusioned with his career as a postdoctoral researcher for a couple of reasons. “Research has a really narrow focus,” he explains. “As time went on, I felt I was learning more and more about less and less. Plus, the energy is always on securing grants to continue the research. I didn’t want to get stuck chasing funding all of the time just to hold down a position in a university, and I didn’t want to spend my life moving liquids from one tube to another.”
Looking back, there were signs that teaching may have been his true calling. “During my time at UCC, I got to lecture and I really liked it. The groups were huge, though – 200-300 pre-med students or first-year nurses – so I might as well have been speaking to an empty lecture theatre as to 300 silent students,” he admits. “But I did have some smaller fourth-year groups and that’s when I really got a taste for it.”
Cathcart initially accepted the maternity leave teaching cover with some reluctance. “I thought, teaching in a school? I don’t know if I can hack that.” But he immediately liked the atmosphere in the school and in the classroom. “I got on really well with the students and I brought a lot of experience to the table that was unusual enough and the students appreciated that,” he says. He’s been at Temple Carrig School since it was founded 11 years ago and he describes the culture there as “really something special... My colleagues are amazing and the kids we teach are lovely. It’s just really enjoyable.”
Next week, October 6th-10th, is International Happiness at Work Week, an annual initiative designed to invite conversations about how to make happiness in the workplace the norm.
