Home on the road can't truck my blues away

Confirmations, communions and childbirth. International haulier Tony Heffernan has missed out on a lot of them since the first of his nine children was born 23 years ago.

He's on the road in his Renault Magnum five days a week delivering beef across Europe and North Africa and spends just 48 hours a week at home in Rosslare, Co Wexford.

He's spent 33 years on the road and knows it's a tough life - not one he would advise any of his offspring to take up. He could be going anywhere from week to week and says he has to "keep the wheels going all the time to have any sort of living out of it".

If he could turn back time, he would change jobs so he'd have more time to spend with his children, he says. "You miss them growing up - you're not here to see them growing up. I feel terrible sad not to be there for a communion or a confirmation or that."

And if it's difficult for him, he acknowledges that it also puts a strain on a wife and mother, because she can't have any time for herself. "On the mother it's not fair because she has them 24 hours a day. She can't even go out at night unless she can get a babysitter."

Sometimes if he has to go to Africa he can be away for up to three weeks - and this was exactly what put a strain on his marriage 10 years ago. At that time, he was away all the time, doing runs to Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, while his wife was rearing seven children.

"Because of the pressures of the work, she wasn't able for it, so we parted after 15 years," he says. Tony's present partner Donna, mother of five-year-old Shannon and three-year-old Shane, is "worked to the bone, she is. She's no life at all - 24 hours a day with them, seven days a week."

Although 15 years has passed, he still remembers vividly the time he missed the birth of the youngest child of his first family: He was in Algeria, which meant waiting in the docks for an indefinite period until a ship could bring him back to Europe. Every night he would have to book a call at the post office to ring home. He didn't think he'd be away for too long, but "it went into a couple of weeks and she gave birth and there was a baby born and at home and that before I got home".

At least the telephone technology has changed since then, Now he faces £600 to £700 mobile-phone bills every month as he keeps in touch while he's on the road.

There's one advantage to Heffernan's locale and lifestyle. Living in Rosslare, near the ferry, "I can look out the window and see is the ship in or not. If it's not I can go back to bed."

His lorry is a home away from home, with air conditioning, central heating, television, radio, CD player, fridge and two beds - which means he can bring his children away on trips with him. Europe's changing landscape has made that a more boring prospect than it used to be: "Now it's motorway, motorway, motorway, nearly all the time."

Nonetheless, five-year-old Shannon has been to Spain, Italy, Holland, Germany, Denmark France and Belgium - but she can't go away as much with him anymore. "When I was four I used to," she says. "But now I can't sometimes 'cause I've got school, but at Halloween I'm going to France to see the fireworks."

Her father knows it's an unusual lifestyle, to say the least. "A lot of kids would be envious of her - a five-year-old coming into school saying `I was Holland the weekend', or Paris."