We’re moving back to the UK! The contract is signed, the movers booked, and Layla has her crate for the ferry. After three years in Ireland, there’s lots to love and a little to loathe. Here are my top five good sides of living here (with five bad to come after).
Living in Ireland: the good side
1. Being an author in Ireland
You know you’re welcome in a country when your vocation is zero-rated for income tax. Authors and many other creative artists pay no income tax on the first €50,000 they earn from their work. I dream of earning enough for that limit to matter, but I registered all the same1The irony is not lost I’ll be living in the UK and paying tax to HMRC when I have enough books published to earn more than pocket-change..
If nothing else, someone at the Irish Revenue service read Blood River and decided that it qualifies as a work of creative art. I’ll take my recognition anywhere I can get it!
2. Irish Sunday opening hours
Sunday opening hours are a weird anachronism of British life. On the one day of the week when you have time to shop, they’re only allowed to open for eight hours. Supermarkets close at 4pm or 5pm, and shopping centres at 6pm. There’s some archaic conservative/religious justification for this that’s more powerful than giving retail workers fixed hours and decent overtime pay.
Ireland — arguably a more religious country than the UK — has no such restrictions. Many shops close earlier on a Saturday so that staff can enjoy the evening, but you can still get to the shops at 8pm or later or a Sunday.
3. The Irish deli counter (and breakfast rolls)
Wherever you go in Ireland, every petrol station and supermarket will have a deli counter. Here you can buy baked goods and a roll or a sandwich, hot or cold, freshly made by hand. The signature menu items for any deli counter are the breakfast roll and the chicken fillet roll, but you can have pretty much what you like.
The breakfast roll is just what you’d imagine: a full Irish breakfast stuffed into a buttered torpedo roll. Bacon, eggs, sausages, mushrooms, tomatoes, black pudding, WHITE PUDDING!, and hash browns. Yes, hash browns in bread. Runny yolks. Red sauce (or brown, ye filthy dogs). As for the chicken fillet roll, I prefer the breaded spicy southern-style chicken, sliced, with mayo, bacon, tomato and a bit of red onion.
The UK has nothing on this. Gregg’s holds no pleasure after a deli counter chicken roll. Subway is a bastardised American imitation. Irish deli counters might not be haute cuisine, but they’re a cultural institution and very, very welcome.
4. The Irish countryside
After living in London for 20+ years, moving to Portlaoise felt like living in a wilderness. It’s true that one reason we’re moving back is because it lacks the cultural richness of a big city, but I have loved being so close to the great outdoors.
A five minute drive takes me to Togher Woods, a small but pretty woodland where, I walk Layla most mornings around the 3km perimeter path. Around 20 minutes gets us to the Slieve Bloom hills, where Glenbarrow Waterfalltumbles beside a steep path. In the opposite direction, all around, we can visit lakes and bog walks and forests, large and small. The air is fresh and clean and it sometimes smells of shite, but in the way that the countryside should smell a bit.
A couple of hours west puts you on the Wild Atlantic Way, and it’s not much further south to the coasts and sandy beaches of Wexford, Waterford or Cork counties. If the summer sun puts on a show, the Irish coast is delightful. But if it says it’ll be wet or windy, dress for the worst.
5. Layla’s friends (and their owners)
One of the things I worry about the most with our move is that Layla won’t see her friends. Early mornings in the woods are quiet enough that she can run off lead with her besties, chasing, barking, playing bitey-face and sniffing every tree. Then there are her buddies at the farm where she stays if we go away, and the occasional chums who pop up at other walking spots.
Rural Ireland doesn’t have much to offer socially if you’re not into sport or pubs (where the talk is mostly of sport), so adopting Layla has been a shot in the arm for our social lives. I know all of their dogs’ names, and some of the owners’ too.