Returning back home to Ireland for a better lifestyle... really?

“Is this for real?” I gasped as we drove into the big Bishopscourt Dunnes shortly before 8.15am last Sunday morning. We thought we’d been so clever. We’d hauled over there at that hour for their extra-large ceramic planters, which were half the price we’d have been charged in the garden centre we’d tried. The idea being that at 8am or thereabouts we could park right next to the shop entrance in a nice big empty car park. We’d have plenty of space around the car to load the enormous things into the boot and the back seat in comfort. Now we stared, like two rubes.

The car parks were already nearly half full, many of the spaces bristling with enormous SUVs and four-wheel drives whose backsides poked well over their allocated parking spaces. What is this Irish preoccupation with driving around in behemoths when your average daily journey is only a few miles to work or shopping?

We found a place near the entrance with a few vacant car spaces, parked and hot-footed it inside.

“What’s going on?” I asked the cashier.

“Is there some looming food shortage that we haven’t been aware of?”

She laughed. No, she said, it was just really busy - often on a Sunday morning customers would sit waiting in their cars from 7.30am for the shop to open at 8am.

“But why?” I asked.

Some customers were coming off shifts up at CUH and getting the shopping done on the way home, she explained. But as for the rest? About those she had no idea.

“But it’s nearly half-full already,” I gasped.

“Ah, it’s actually not that bad now, but it gets very busy here on a Sunday by about 10.30am,” she said.

In fairness to Dunnes, their Bishopstown roundabout premises is a truly attractive, utterly gorgeous shop. Beautifully laid out and, in the drapery, household and garden sections where we were, with extremely nice products to buy and friendly, interested staff who are quick to help you find something. All the same though, it wouldn’t be my destination of choice on a lovely warm blue-skies summer Sunday morning.

We bought the planters and packed them into the boot and the passenger seat. As we closed the boot and the back doors, an enormous SUV pulled in right behind us, nose almost touching the boot of our car. Seconds later two equally huge vehicles slid into the parking spaces on either side of us. If we hadn’t had the containers packed in, we’d have been in trouble.

“Jaysus,” my husband said, “let’s get the hell out of here. This place is way too busy for me.”

The point of this little tale is that an acquaintance who has lived in the USA for 40 years – she emigrated in the bad old days of the late eighties and never came back – told me she was wishful-thinking about returning to the ‘ould sod. Many of the Irish friends who emigrated with her have now started selling up and coming back to dear old County Cork and, they believe, a slower, better, healthier quality of living.

Some had already sold up and for big money - a million or more, she said. Hmmm, I said. The average asking price here for a nice four-bedroomed semi-detached house in a relatively good area was now upwards of €400,000 to half a million. Or more. Three bedroomed homes go for around €300,000 or more, I said, again depending where you buy. The average rent in the city is reaching €1800 a month. A friend of mine was looking in Clonakilty recently, I told her, and a relatively ordinary-looking house on an unremarkable site but boasting five bedrooms just outside the town was coming to market at nearly €800,000.

“What about the lifestyle in Ireland now?” she asked.

“Much faster, much busier,” I reported.

I told her about Dunnes and the people waiting outside the doors at 7.30am on a Sunday morning.

She’d heard there was a lot of violence on the streets and a lot of problems on the roads with speeding and accidents and the lack of gardaí around the place.

Well, now, there are problems, I said cautiously. The feeling was, I said, that gardaí were under massive pressure in terms of resources, rostering and an aggressive and condemnatory garda management – they were being prosecuted for the most ridiculous things.

I started telling her about the lockdown controversy about the garda sergeant, the pensioner and the loan of the bicycle but she interrupted me.

“Oh yeah we heard about that. Totally bizarre,” she said.

She asked about the jobs market.

“Pretty strong,” I opined; from what I could see there was a skills shortage across the board because so many skilled and highly qualified workers couldn’t afford the cost of accommodation.

“I heard there’s even talk about sex for rent situations there now,” she said.

“You do keep your finger on the pulse,” I sighed.

She asked about the cost of living.

High and getting higher, I said sadly. My son and his partner, I explained, had moved to Edinburgh a year ago, landing jobs on similar salaries to what they were earning in Ireland. They had reported that without even trying they were managing to save up to a third of their salaries in Scotland.

Were Irish people still as friendly as they used to be, she wanted to know.

I changed the subject. I mean, what can you honestly say to that when most people won’t take their eyes off their phones long enough to say hello or even look where they’re going?