When money is too tight to mention . . .

Hard Times:Young, well-educated couples are finding themselves with major financial worries

WHEN THE offer of a job in Waterford came out of the blue for design engineer Jeff Neal a year and a half ago, it seemed the ideal opportunity for him, his wife Cliona and their two young sons to start a new life away from Dublin.

After seven years with one company, he was “job hopping” at the time and they had been looking to move from Ratoath to be nearer Cliona’s family in Foxrock. They had already put a deposit on a house in Arklow, Co Wicklow, but the chance to work and live in Waterford seemed too good to pass up.

“We rented for six months and thought everything was going great,” says Jeff (34), who is half Australian and half Alaskan and who followed 36-year-old Cliona to Ireland 11 years ago after they met in Sydney.

“We had to write off the deposit on the Arklow house because we thought it was such a good deal to come down here.”

They bought a five-bedroom house in The Paddocks, on the outskirts of the city, and moved in just over a year ago.

“It was a few weeks later, four days before my probation period was up, the boss just called me in and said I’ve got no work . . . goodbye,” says Jeff.

“I knew somebody who got me a job in Carlow but that was never going to be long term, it was just a short project. That wrapped up at the beginning of June and since then I have been looking.

“I’ve got education and a lot of good experience and I don’t like sitting around the house but it’s what I’ve been doing,” says Jeff. “I have been applying for anything and everything that I am even halfway qualified for, just to try to get something.”

He is either being told he is over-qualified or that he doesn’t have the right experience.

“I have picked up a few days of cash labouring here and there, but nothing consistent. That’s where we are now. We’re floating around, barely scraping by on the dole.

“I have gone on anti-depressants in the last four or five months, that’s partly because it runs in the family but it’s also partly due to the fact that I feel I am the breadwinner and I am not winning bread. It is just completely devastating; soul-destroying is what we keep saying.”

It is a scenario that is unfolding in tens of thousands of other homes around the State in recent months as employment reaches more than 320,000.

Young, well-educated couples like Jeff and Cliona, for whom the future seemed assured when they married in 2002, find themselves in a situation they had never envisaged.

The practical and emotional consequences for family life are profound. It can be a delicate balance between needing to make children aware of the changed circumstances, and not burdening them with all their parents’ worries.

The way you deal with it very much depends on the child, says Parentline manager Rita O’Reilly. The confidential helpline has had a noticeable increase in calls since Christmas but she does not know if that is due to the knock-on effects of financial stress. She advises parents to answer questions truthfully but in age-appropriate language.

“Try not to involve the children in your worries. If there is fighting between mummy and daddy over the whole thing, try to keep it away from the kids. You might have to explain to them that circumstances have changed but it is not the worry side of it, it is the practical side you explain to them.”

When dealing with teenagers who have known nothing except the Celtic Tiger and are very much into instant gratification, she says: “Be firm; this is a dose of reality. Distinguish between the needs and wants, and then stick to it.”

The Money Advice and Budgeting Service (MABS) has not only become much busier in recent months, but is also handling a new type of client.

“Traditionally most of the people we would see were low income or on social welfare; now you could be in a good job one month and on social welfare the next month,” says MABS spokesman Michael Culloty.

They encourage people to be realistic about their budget, but he acknowledges that this can cause relationship difficulties with a spouse or with children.

“People sometimes try to hide the new reality but it’s good to talk, it’s good for the family to talk because then they can begin to comprehend the reality of the situation, not with any scaremongering but in a holistic and in a family way.”

A tight budget severely restricts the Neals’s activities. “We can’t go out, or if we do, we feel guilty about paying,” says Jeff. “We are running out of free activities.”

At the beginning of Jeff’s unemployment, they took a three-month payment holiday on the mortgage and then went to interest only for nine months, which will soon be up. Mortgage interest is part of their social welfare allowance – “social welfare is covering most of the mortgage”, Jeff explains, “but that is only for a couple more months and then we are in a bit more trouble.”

What make matters worse for the Neals is that Cliona, who is a qualified florist and worked as an office manager before the children were born, is in constant pain due to arthritis in her back and is unable to work.

“I have been on a cocktail of different drugs that don’t work over the last year or two,” she says. “I was finding it hard to even lift the boys, change nappies or get them in and out of the school for playschool; I just could not do it.

“Jeff wasn’t getting his time to do his job-searching; then if he did travel for an interview, by the time he got back in the evening I would be doubled up in pain.”

Her mother, wanting to help any way she could, is now paying for an au pair from Germany for them.

Having always been a “get up and go person”, Cliona says not being able to work makes her feel helpless.

How do they keep their spirits up? “We don’t,” says Jeff. “We try to,” interjects Cliona.

“We have both been noticeably short-tempered,” says Jeff. “We have days when the two of us just sit there and scowl at each other and blame each other for everything and row over nothing; then there are days when you can’t help but laugh and get on with it.”

Four-year-old Malachy is in playschool five mornings a week and two-year-old Tadgh has just started a playgroup two mornings a week.

“We don’t want to skimp on their education,” stresses Cliona, “that would be the last thing I would want to go. Both of them are thriving and having a great time there, I don’t want to take that away from them.”

Pre-school centres around the State report that parents are withdrawing children or cutting down on the number of days they attend because they can no longer afford to send them.

“Services are being asked by parents to be more flexible,” explains Irene Gunning, the chief executive office of IPPA, the Early Childhood Organisation. Even if parents have lost jobs, they are trying to negotiate some pre-school time for their children because they see the benefits, she points out.

One manager of a community-based centre in Cork says that 10 per cent of the 56 children attending are reducing their days. One is a child from a family with literacy problems who has just gone from five to three mornings a week because her mother has lost her part-time cleaning job. What about other children, she asks, who instead of coming here will end up watching television?

The Marriage and Relationship Counselling Service (MRCS) is seeing the effects of the recession creeping into its caseload.

“Financial worries undoubtedly put a huge strain on family life,” says Francesca McGuinn, a relationship counsellor with MRCS and co-ordinator of its service for teenagers, Teen Between.

“Parents are more likely to argue with each other and with the children. They may become more distant and distracted because of the day-to-day struggle of trying to work things out and make ends meet.”

While it is important not to burden children with anxiety, they do need to have some sort of understanding as to why things at home are so different, she says. Why there are more arguments, more tension; why mum and dad are behaving so differently.

“Children will always imagine the worst and what they ultimately need is reassurance that everything will be all right, that they are secure, that they are loved and that the family is not going to fall apart.”

The strain financial difficulties can put on a couple’s relationship are huge, McGuinn adds. “This is obviously something that they need to talk about – away from the children.”

The Neals are well aware of how changed circumstances have affected their marriage.

“It has been quite a strain on the relationship,” says Jeff. “We can both be volatile people anyway.”

On the plus side, says Cliona: “We have got pretty good at trying to discuss our feelings. We’ve been married six years and, as time goes on, you get better at doing stuff like that. We have said to each other that we both feel the same, give each other a hug and a kiss and say try to be positive and see how the next month goes. That is all we can do really.”

One thing that upsets her is the “huge difference” she has noticed in the health services for her children, now they can no longer afford to go private.

“I am kind of disgusted and angry about it. These are children and they should be looked after and they are just not.”

Tadgh, she explains, has had problems with his tummy since he was six weeks old. “We have felt for a long, long time that there is something wrong with him. He has been a very upset baby and we have gone to different paediatricians.”

Initially he was diagnosed as being allergic to dairy.

“He got really bad when we moved here; crying constantly, awake all the time. If we had money at the time, we would have gone to a paediatrician or got him allergy tested, and done something about it to try to make him better.”

Instead they had to wait three months for Tadgh to be seen and then, she says, his problems were, in a three-minute consultation, put down to “the terrible twos”.

“This might sound snobby but I was used, if one of us was sick, to finding and paying somebody to try their best to work out what was wrong,” says Cliona. “I still think he is in pain but we don’t seem to be able to get it diagnosed.”

His big brother has problems of his own. Malachy was a year and a half when a speech delay was picked up and he was put on a waiting list for speech therapy. “But somehow when we moved from Ratoath down to Waterford he got lost in the system. So he only just started speech therapy eight weeks ago and he has come on leaps and bounds.

“But I often think if Jeff had a job and we were able to afford speech therapy six or eight months ago with a private speech and language therapist, that he would be saying an extra two or three hundred words now and it would be a little bit easier to understand him.”

Jeff says the lack of money also means that the alternative therapies Cliona would like to try for her back are also out of the question.

“If I had a decent job and we could spend the money we might be in a bit better shape and get on with our lives a little bit more, but it’s a . . .” “vicious circle,” Cliona fills in.

Do they see any positives in all the gloom? “We have each other,” says Cliona.

“We traded up from a three-bedroom house to a five-bedroom for much the same mortgage,” says Jeff. “We like the area, it’s much nicer. I always wanted to be closer to the sea.”

“The boys are happy,” continues Cliona, “and it feels like a place I would want to stay.”

Would they think of going back to Australia? “I’m more of a home bird,” says Cliona, “not good in the heat. I really just want to live in Ireland.”

“I’m keeping quiet,” says Jeff pointedly, but adds: “It is a possibility in the future but for now we are going to give Ireland a little more of a chance.”

* Money Advice and Budgeting Service helpline: 1890-283438 or see mabs.ie

* Marriage and Relationship Counselling Service: 1890-380380 or see mrcs.ie

* Parentline: 1890-927277 or see parentline.ie