Moving home was traumatic for the O’Sullivan family, but they survived – with the help of their neighbours
PSYCHOLOGISTS SAY the act of moving home can be one of life’s most stressful activities, similar to dealing with death or divorce. Apart from the logistics of the actual move, settling into a new environment can take years as Lionel and Geraldine O’Sullivan found when they upped sticks and moved from Dublin to west Clare in 1990.
Taking five young children and their cat and dog with them, and leaving behind a secure income and their extended family and friends, they pursued a long-cherished dream of living in the country. When they heard of the newly established Rural Resettlement scheme promoting people moving to depopulated areas, they decided to buy the last house they viewed on a day trip to the county with the proceeds from the sale of their Clondalkin home.
It was the sighting of a rabbit that helped swing it for them. The Rural Resettlement scheme’s founder, Jim Connolly, was showing off one last property after spending a few hours bringing them and their children, aged between 10 months and 14 years, around a series of vacant houses. “The kids saw a rabbit in the field, I’ll always remember, and they thought it was so fantastic to see a rabbit. They all loved it up here,” says Geraldine.
Today, at the bottom of the 400-yard lane to their home, a sign says “Hill 16” and a upright flagstone is painted with the Dublin colours. For Lionel and Geraldine, declaring their home county’s colours is mischievous recognition that even after two decades they are regarded as blow-ins in a rural community near the village of Cooraclare.
“We’ll always be blow-ins. I mean that in the nicest possible sense. Personally, I am delighted to be a blow-in and living down here. I love it. I would never go back to Dublin,” says Lionel.
Geraldine too has made her peace with the area after initially struggling to reconcile herself with her new life. She grew up in Finglas, but now finds it hard to go back there when visiting her elderly mother. “It is so claustrophobic I can’t stick it. There’s houses behind you, there’s houses beside you, there’s houses in front of you.”
In contrast, “Hill 16” is a converted and refurbished farmhouse whose old haggard – a section of ground for vegetables – is now a lawn and flower beds set off by original stone walls. A side and front paddock and old outhouses are now used to keep Trigger and Bobby, two ponies, belonging to their daughter Leah, whose childhood interest in horses led her to becoming a qualified equestrian instructor. With the children now grown up, two dogs and a cat watch over what appears on a summer’s evening to be an idyllic home.
But it has been a long road getting to the place they love. The couple were originally able to pay off the mortgage on their old home and had enough left over to fund the £10,000 asking price for the rundown farmhouse. But with little left over, they soon discovered it was going to take a lot to make the house habitable. Lionel says he had never even heard of a septic tank until buying the new home. It had no inside toilet and needed a complete refurbishment.
“We didn’t realise there was going to be so much that had to be done. When we came down in August I actually sat outside there in tears, saying, ‘I can’t come down here, I can’t bring five kids down here, no way’,” says Geraldine.
They attempted to do a U-turn and cancel the sale of their Dublin home. “But when we went back, the couple who had bought our house wouldn’t pull out of the sale. They wanted our house and that was that. So we said, ‘We have to keep going’,” she adds.
The family moved into a rented house in the village while Lionel finished up his job at Loctite in Tallaght. With no car and no phone, she had to rely on the village phonebox. “He’d say to me, ‘Be in the village at three o’clock when you’re picking the kids up from school and I’ll ring you at the public phone box’.
“There I am in the phone box and I’m talking to him and I’m crying, ‘I can’t stick it down here, you’ll have to come down and get me, I can’t handle any more of this’. I was in the phone box crying and I didn’t know everybody in the whole place was looking at me.”
Help came from the school principal who recommended some local builders. Geraldine also remembers laying sewage pipes with her father in the lashing rain. By December 1990, the family was settled in. Neighbours helped out as well.
“That Christmas we went home for a couple of days to the family,” says Lionel. “When we came back, there was all my neighbours cutting back the bushes, because you couldn’t get up the avenue. Only bicycles could get up.”
Geraldine adds: “And then another neighbour had left a Christmas cake on the window sill for when we came back.”
But she remained torn, she says, by the idea of returning to the city. “I spent the first year saying to Lionel, ‘We can’t stay here, we are getting out of here, and you are going to go back and beg for your job back’. I didn’t care.”
Lionel first started doing odd jobs in the area, learning how to plant cabbages when working for a farmer and doing contract work in Ennis before getting a job as a driver for a local bakery. Later he got a job as a FÁS supervisor. “That was a great start for me because I got a diploma out of it and it brought me more into the community,” he says.
Geraldine, meanwhile, took a job minding kids and worked in a pub for a time. “It was the one thing that got me out of the house and it was what I needed. It was very difficult for me because I was at home a lot with the kids. I was used to hopping on a bus. I never had to depend on a car before. I could hop on a bus and go into town or go over to my mother.”
She also felt sorry for the children, who had to face into new schools and had been in the scouts, cubs and guides when in Dublin. “They only had to hop over the wall to their friends next door. And we had made that decision to bring them down here.”
There were compensations, however. Leah was allowed to use a horse on a neighbouring farm whenever she wanted and one of the boys, Eoin, loved doing farm work there. “He’d come cycling home in the dark with two buckets of milk on the handlebars. But he loved it and that kept him going,” Geraldine says.
She believes the second youngest, Ciaran, then aged six, was unsure about the new home because she didn’t like it. “I was reading him a story one night and he said, ‘Ma, I think I might get to like it down here after all’. At that stage, he was after discovering the bog and he would be in the bog all day long. We still have all his little drawings of birds and flowers and insects.”
After hearing this, Geraldine had her moment of reconciliation, saying to herself: “What am I doing here? I can’t keep thinking in my head that I’m not staying here. This is it. We have brought them here now, we are staying.”
They underline that continued support from neighbours eased the way. “If it was not for the neighbours here we would have gone back whether we liked it or not,” says Lionel.
He now works as a delivery man for a local supermarket, a job which he enjoys because he is meeting people all day. He does notice, though, how isolated some people are. “I have found that the old people love a few minutes to chat to them. You really have to make that little bit of time,” he says.
As the children got older Geraldine has found she had more time to spend on herself. In the past 10 years she has gone to yoga and aquafit classes. “I never had the time or the money to go to them, and you would be too wrecked at night,” she says.
If it is still a long way from Dublin, they have found that relatives and friends have enjoyed visiting them over the years. Lionel even got to hold the Sam Maguire Cup after Dublin won the all-Ireland in 1995. The cup came to Tubridy’s pub, Cooraclare, via one of the players, whose father came from the village. “Back in Dublin I never got within a couple of hundred yards of it. Here I am in the west of Ireland and I get to hold it.”
He adds that there is an in-built harmony in sporting the Dublin colours locally. “It’s the Cooraclare colours as well and I’d say, that’s the only reason I came down here, to make me feel at home.”
