My homebound flight cut into Dublin at an angle which gave me a great view of the city below. It looked as grey, damp and low-key as ever, but I couldn’t help but get excited, so much so that when the plane rolled to a stop and the seatbelt signs pinged off I jumped to my feet, retrieved my bag from the overhead locker and joined the queue to disembark knowing full well that the doors wouldn’t open for another 10 minutes.
Hot, humid, muggy Bangkok has a smell that slams visitors in the face when they arrive and sticks to them for the duration of their stay. Although best described as a mixture of car fumes, poorly maintained sewers and cheap cooking oils, you eventually become immune. But the clean, cool, crisp air that sweeps across Ireland and into the aircraft cabins on Dublin Airport’s runways made me instantly realise how deprived I had been. It was like gulping a first breath after being held under water for too long.
I declined to have anyone meet me at the arrivals hall, mainly due to the fact that it would have meant an airport run at rush hour, but also because my mother, the prime candidate for such an imposition, had herself been bitten by the travel bug and was mid-way through a solo trip around Australia.
And so it was that I hopped on the airport bus to O’Connell Street, wheeled my suitcase past the Spire, over the bridge and down the quays to Tara Street Dart station while a misty drizzle settled on my summery clothes. I was feeling good.
But my mood of airy optimism was soon to grind to a halt. A quick flick through a newspaper some thoughtful commuter had left on my Dart seat quickly acquainted me with the state of terror the country has found itself in since the onset of the recession. I had kept reasonably up-to-date with the major happenings in Ireland while away, but I somehow didn’t take on board the full extent of the damage being done to the Irish economy.
The paper screamed headlines about massive budget deficits, bank shares collapsing and tens of thousands of immigrants turning on their heels and heading straight back to the airport. I mean, I leave you people alone to look after the country for five minutes and come back to find it in this state?!
Anyway, by the time I knocked on my old front door in Ballybrack, the weather had conspired with the economic gloom to knock all the wide-eyed nostalgia I had briefly felt for my soggy homeland out of my system. I decided that my ma, who has signalled her intention to stay abroad indefinitely, had the right idea.
Reunions with various friends and family members were every bit as enjoyable as I expected them to be, and one in particular – with a lad I had been good mates with since primary school – proved extremely interesting. Robbie had been contacted by a friend of his who worked in Australia’s booming mining industry.
Apparently, mineral companies were struggling to find both skilled and non-skilled labourers among the domestic workforce, and were offering implausibly generous packages for those willing to work shifts in middle-of-nowhere outback mine sites. Robbie’s mate was cleaning up, and reckoned he could sort us each out with a job that would allow us to do likewise. With Ireland’s full-blown 1980s-style butter voucher, crispy pancake, SodaStream recession making my chances of securing full-time employment within a reasonable time-frame unlikely, a legger back to the airport sounded like just the job.
I’ve had older siblings and other family relatives who joined the hordes heading for Ireland’s points of departure when our economy was last in shreds. And now I would get to experience it for myself. The last time I went away I was a shiny new product turned out by the Celtic Tiger’s education system, which plucked youngsters from council estates and put them through third level for free. But going abroad to take a job as a reporter with a publishing house in Bangkok had a very different feel than the trip I was eyeing this time round.
And so it was that Robbie and I began to lay our plans to take that well-worn route to Australia’s sunny shores, with March pencilled in as our date of departure from recession-hit Ireland…
Series concluded
Robert Carry is a former staff journalist at Metro Éireann where he served as chief sports reporter and headed the paper’s Northern Ireland news section. He is currently working in Thailand as the news editor of an English-language magazine
