Cork couple appear in Baz's new TV series featuring Irish people abroad

IRISH people have long been famed for their ability to re-locate to various destinations all around the world.

It is a trait that Baz Ashmawy explores in his new six-part series Best Place To Be, which starts on RTÉ1 on Tuesday at 7pm.

The presenter travels across Europe meeting Irish people who have uprooted the lives to make a home elsewhere.

Over the series, Baz meets a variety of people who have made a new home abroad and gets the lowdown on their new country when it comes to how they live, work and play.

The programmes take him to Spain, Norway, Italy, France, Hungary, and Germany. In each place, he spends time with Irish people learning about their lives, finding out why, for them, it’s the Best Place To Be.

How many of us wonder what it’s like to live abroad, and if it is it all it’s cracked up to be? Baz will give viewers an insight into what it’s like for Irish people living in the rest of Europe, providing lots of fun and laughs along the way.

He starts off in Spain, where he meets hotelier couple Joan and John Gallagher, originally from Roscommon, and events designer and stylist Róisín Moloney, from Dublin.

Joan and John, in their sixties, left Boyle 22 years ago, with their four young sons, to set up a life in Sitges. There they made a living by renovating and renting properties, and teaching English.

Just recently, again they’ve reinvented themselves, this time as hoteliers opening a boutique aparthotel in the Tarragona region of Spain, where they have become very much part of the local community.

On the flip side, Róisín, 40, is recently living in Barcelona, where she has opened an event design and styling company and is navigating all the challenges that setting up a business in a new country brings.

Later in the series, Baz catches up with a restaurant owned and run by a brother and sister from Cork in France.

In Norway, he visits a woman from Limerick who has been living in Oslo for almost 30 years, and a young woman from Dublin who has just begun making a life there.

While in Turin in northern Italy, Baz spends time with a host of young people in their twenties who are enjoying what Italy has to offer them as a home compared to their lives in Ireland.

In Hungary, Baz hangs out in Budapest with a guy from Donegal and his Hungarian boyfriend who run a perfume shop in the city, before visiting a rural part of the country to meet an artist from Dublin.