Tom Gilmore on walkabout – Going home from Australia for Christmas

CHRISTMAS in Australia is beneath a sweltering sun while the Ireland that some of the emigrants are going back to this week in Galway is a total contrast with frost, ice and all the traditional trappings that make Christmas white (or off white) in the Northern hemisphere but red hot here in Australia.

However many will be leaving the heat for a while and it will be a merry Christmas for them in Tuam and other areas of the  West of Ireland, far from West Australia, this year. Others are staying put here in Perth and waiting until the Galway Races next July to return home.

But Joanne Tighe, Rinkippen, Tuam and her boyfriend Barry Heverin, Gallagh, Brownsgrove are among the many who will be home for Christmas. They both live in Brisbane where Joanne is working in the IT sector while Barry is an engineer on a mining project on an island off the coast of West Australia.

Also going home for Christmas are Cathy and Michael Donovan who operated the Touchwood Furniture business in the N Seventeen Business Park, Tuam and later at Terryland in Galway for almost ten years before moving to Australia in 2007.

Cathy, from Cornfield, Hollymount, Co Mayo, Michael and their two children Darcy and Dan moved from selling furniture in Galway to opening Donovan’s Restaurant in a former bakery in Floreat, Perth.

“We even have a pew from the Augustinian Church in Galway here in the restaurant. We got it when the Church was being restored and it was the first item we put into a container for shipping to Australia,” says Cathy. But just to keep those of the Protestant faith happy as well they have also got six chairs from a Church of England building which are also now in use at a table in the restaurant.

“The children settled in quicker than ourselves when we moved here, they are now 12 and 10,” says Michael who is a native of Perth but who was in business in Ireland for almost eight years. He says they would like to have remained in Ireland but they realised that the boom in the furniture business was coming to an end in 2007.

“All four of us go back home to Mayo and Galway for Christmas and we are looking forward to that,” says Cathy.

But former Athenry resident Des Ruane, and his wife and their young daughter, will be staying in Perth for the Christmas. Des is  celebrating one of his most successful years ever as a one of Australia’s most successful car salespeople with the John Hughes Motor Company in Perth which sells an average of 20,000 cars per year and for ten years has been the biggest seller of new cars in the world.

Des, who is a grandson of the late Senator Sean T Ruane, a Fine Gael Seanad representative for Mayo for many years, and a personal friend of Irish patriot Michael Collins, left his job with Higgins Motors, Galway during the Celtic Tiger boom in 2002 to seek a new life in Australia.

“I am still here after the Celtic Tiger boom has passed on. I have no regrets about leaving Ireland during what may have been a strange time to emigrate, when we had an economic upturn,” says Des.

“I’m only a small cog in the big wheel that the John Hughes Motor Company is in this business in Australia,” says this unassuming man who was born in Tuam, raised in Dublin and Crossmolina before he moved to live in Athenry in the mid 1990s. The family still have a house in the town.

“It’s a little different from working back in Galway. We sell, in one week here, what a Galway motor dealership would do in a year. But then we have over 1.8 million people here in Perth, so it is a different market,” he added.

Des is married to Maria, a native of Tullamore, and they have one child, Keisha, who is 10.

Both Des and Maria worked in Perth in 1995 and coming back again to Australia in 2002 was not a huge move for them.

When Des lived in Athenry and worked in Galway he saw how travelling to and from work in the city changed dramatically in the space of 12 months in the early 2000s.

“I went from spending 25 minutes in the car going to work to a stage where the same journey to work took an hour and ten minutes.

“Galway was the fastest growing city in Europe at the time but for that 12 km drive from Athenry it took me that length of time. Now I can do the same distance of a drive to work here in Perth in 15 to 20 minutes,” says Des.

Des and his wife and daughter plan to return to the West of Ireland for a month next July when they will spend some time with his mum and the rest of the extended family in Crossmolina, Galway and Limerick.

“We will also attend the Galway Races but if Galway meet Mayo in the football at that time I’ll be shouting for the men in the red and green,” he concluded with a laugh.

• • •

THIS is my last week in Perth, and by the time you read this I will be on a three-day train journey across the Nullarbor Plain to spend Christmas in Sydney.

During my time in Western Australia it was great to see so many young people from Galway city and county making it big in this great continent down under.

In JB O’Reilly’s Lounge and Restaurant, in Leaderville, Perth, a group of Galway boys, from places such as Kilkerrin, Dunmore, Garrafrauns and Tuam, were whooping it up on a Sunday evening recently, most of them returning to the city for a break from work in the mines a few thousand miles away.

Nearby a girl from Ballyglunin was relaxing in her flat after a busy week’s work in a local bakery shop while across the continent, a three hour plane flight away, and another young Galway girl, from Tuam, was also taking it easy after another week working with Melbourne City Council.

“I’ve been living in Melbourne for four years. I moved here from Dublin in November 2007. I began working as a media strategist with the Victoria Roads section and then with the office of the Victorian Minister for Roads. Soon after that I moved to the City of Melbourne Council,” says Yvonne Lynch.

Yvonne has her Galway roots in Old Road, Tuam, and in Bodane, but since moving out here she has fallen in love with Melbourne.

“It is an amazing city which is recognised year after year as one of the world’s best places to live and was this year given the title of the world’s most liveable city.

“I wanted to be at the heart of what makes Melbourne tick and joining the City of Melbourne was the best way to do that,” she says.

Yvonne has been working with City of Melbourne for over three years, primarily in two roles. Initially she worked as Sustainability Policy Coordinator and now as Team Leader of Urban Landscapes. The core focus of both roles has been responding to predicted future climate change.

She has led the development and implementation of some of Australia’s most progressive environmental initiatives. One of those is a strategy for Melbourne’s 1,200 commercial buildings to make them more energy efficient. In Melbourne commercial buildings are responsible for half of municipal carbon emissions.

The 1,200 Buildings programme is projected to generate $2 billion in new investment in Melbourne and around 8,000 extra green jobs over the life of the programme.

“I also worked on the development of a financial mechanism to build an incentive for environmental retrofits and overcome the difficulty that many building owners have accessing capital to finance their environmental projects,” says Yvonne.

She had a hand in a landmark piece of legislation, passed in 2010 by the Victorian Government, to enable the operation of the financial mechanism for the project.

“I’ve led the implementation of City of Melbourne’s Climate Change Adaptation Strategy. Adaptation to climate change is about future-proofing the city.

“You look at the range of risks and vulnerabilities the

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city will be exposed to in the coming decades, increases in extremes of weather events, sea level rise and a hotter, drier climate — and we must plan to adapt to or minimise the potential exposure. The work I’ve done for City of Melbourne recently gained recognition when we were presented with a national climate champion award,” says Yvonne.

First city

Melbourne was the first city in Australia, and one of the first cities internationally, to develop a Climate Change Adaptation Strategy.

“I’m passionate about trying to create a more environmentally sustainable way of living. Responding to climate change is most important for our society right now,” says the North Galway girl.

Another Galway lady who has been contributing to a more progressive Australia, for decades, is Maura Ducey, nee Mitchell from Dominic Street in the city.

She is very involved with the Irish community in Perth. Her family were well known in business circles in Galway where her parents operated the Claddagh Service Station and guest house on Dominic Street for many years.

Nostalgia

She has nostalgic memories about growing up in Galway in the 1960s and the great support that there was among all the business community at that time. Maura cites the McGuires of Raven Terrace, another well known Galway business family, as great friends and she said Noel, who retired some years ago as fire officer in the city, as well as the rest of his family, have been firm friends over the years.

Maura may be a veteran of the Irish scene out here but an enthusiastic newcomer is Samantha Forde from Garra, Ballyglunin. She is a friendly face behind the counter at the busy Baker’s Delight store in Wembley, Perth. Sometimes she also works at the company’s other store in nearby Subiaco.

To say that Samantha and her colleagues are busy in these bakery shops would be an understatement, but they seem to enjoy their work and the customers are always greeted with a friendly word and smiles all around.

“I moved to work with this company two months ago and I am enjoying it. Life here in Perth is good, it’s a lovely city, even if the cost of living is higher here than at home,” says Samantha. She and her boyfriend, Kyle Quaid, from Knocknacarra, who works as a tiler here, have just got the green light to live and work in Australia and they are delighted about that.

“We are both going home to Galway for Christmas and when we come back I plan to go to college here to study retail management,” says Samantha.

Meanwhile, just a few hundred yards from where Samantha lives, on a sunny Sunday evening, in JB O’Reilly’s Lounge and Restaurant in Leaderville, Galway boys and girls make up a large percentage of the young people having a good time.

In the background a two-piece act belt out mostly Irish ballads and everybody is in the mood for enjoyment.

Rewarding

There we met the three Kitt brothers from Kilkerrin. They have come out here to work at different times and they say that it has been a rewarding experience working in West Australia. Their mother posts them out The Tuam Herald regularly and it keeps them up with all that is happening at home.

Their neighbour, Aidan Raftery, recently joined them from Kilkerrin; his family have been involved in operating the popular Ward’s Restaurant and Lounge at Lerhin near Clonberne for many years.

From Tuam we met Paul Flaherty from Forty Acres and from nearby Gardenfield his friend and work colleague, Paul McHugh.

A good life

“It’s a good life out here and many of us from North Galway have forged new friendships working in the mines and with various construction companies,” says Paul Flaherty.

Two Dunmore men were also among the group, Dermot Ryan from Shanballymore, who was celebrating his birthday that evening, and Alan Melia from Garrafrauns.

“It’s a long way from the White House, be it the one in Garrafrauns or in Washington DC,” concluded Alan with a grin.