Driven to despair
But now with political unrest in Libya sending petrol prices soaring, are car-dependent commuters already struggling to cope with dwindling incomes and increased mortgage repayments regretting the move to suburbia?
In 2006, the leading market research company Experian conducted a nationwide survey of Irish households. Of the 11 distinct household categories identified they found that the newest and youngest demographic was the sizeable segment of the population “prepared to put up with a long car journey to work in exchange for a less expensive or larger house” in towns and villages far outside the main urban centres.
This group Experian labelled the ‘Outer Ring Commuters’. CSO figures from the 2006 census backed-up Experian’s survey, showing a massive migration away from Irish cities into smaller satellite towns far from the centres of Dublin, Galway and Cork.
But for the tens of thousands of Outer Ring Commuters who moved to new housing estates in boom-time Ireland, life in ‘commuterland’ has changed dramatically.
Take the Oak Court estate on the fringes of Kells, Co Meath. Oak Court is 70km from Dublin city centre, built just 10 years ago. The estate houses mostly transplanted Dubliners, most of whom couldn’t afford the capital’s property prices, or else wanted to move from densely-populated suburbs like Glasnevin and Templeogue to more spacious housing in Leinster’s commuter belt.
Emer McManus, 28, a senior administrator at the Institute for Public Administration in Lansdowne Road in Dublin, was one Dublin-based worker lured to Oak Court by cheaper property prices.
She bought the house at the peak of the boom in 2007, a two-bedroom terraced house for €217,000. At the time she felt compelled to buy, afraid she’d miss out on the ever-spiralling boom if she didn’t. “It’s not worth anywhere near that now, so I can’t think about selling, I can’t even think about moving,” she says in her accent Meath-Dublin blend.
Emer’s alarm clock goes off at 5.30am on weekdays. She’s in the car by 6.15am.
In theory the commuting time has been cut to an hour each way with the opening of the new M3. But with two €2.90 toll charges between Kells and Dublin, “the M3 is too expensive. I can’t afford to use it. Maybe just once a week, if at all.”
Instead Emer keeps to the old N2 and the back-roads, which have been badly potholed by the winter freezing and are yet to be repaired. “The roads are terrible now, I must say. You’d be afraid you’d burst a tyre going over them.”
Emer leaves her desk every evening at 4.30pm, and pulls into her drive-way in Oak Court around 6.15pm. The 140km round trip is exhausting, and costs around €80 a week on diesel. Using public transport would be a little cheaper, but the combination of bus and DART would add considerably to her already long commuting time.
Exhausted with trudging up and down to Dublin every day, Emer did look for work around the Kells area a few years ago. “I looked for admin jobs in Navan, Kells, Athboy, Trim. And there was a huge difference in the wages. For the job that I’m doing now, you’d be looking at a drop in your wages by eight or nine grand.”
In the meantime, Emer finds it hard not to compare herself against others who didn’t buy property during the boom. “I mean, my friend is renting a two-bedroom apartment in Kells for €400 a month — my mortgage has gone up to €1,000.
“So the diesel goes up, the mortgage goes up, and my wages go down by over €100 a week.
“If the mortgage goes up any more I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Emer says she has little choice but to soldier on and stay put for now. “Obviously the way things are going I won’t be leaving for the time being. But I’d like to think that I’m not going to be travelling up and down for the rest of my life.
“If I didn’t have my house, if I didn’t have my mortgage, I’d prefer to live in Dublin. I find it very difficult travelling up and down, especially in the winter.”
For others who uprooted to far-flung corners of suburbia the growing sense of crisis is laced with a bleak humour.
Marie bought a house in Douglas in Cork when she started working with a financial services company in the city in 2005.
Four years into her €310,000 mortgage she lost her job, but she was lucky enough to find one a few months later in a company near Killarney.
“I took a big cut in wages and now I have a 90-minute commute every morning, so the price of petrol has eaten into my cash too,” she says. “But at least I have a job. I can see from the number of cars in the drive in my estate that a lot of people are at home all day, and even though my budget is very tight, I feel commuting is the lesser of two evils.”
She thought of renting out her house in Douglas and buying a cheaper one in Killarney, but now no bank will give her a mortgage on her reduced salary.
“I am getting up at 6.30am and getting home after 7pm,” says Marie, “so my weekends are mostly spent sleeping!”
John, 38, a native Dubliner, is a public servant in Galway city. But high property prices there forced him to look eastwards for a suitable home for his wife and three children. At the peak of the property boom in 2007, John bought a three-bedroom semi-detached house on the Esker Glen estate in Drumlish on the outskirts of Longford town.
“I mean, I bought the house for €320,000 , and in total I owe almost half a million in loans. Now the thing is,” says John with a chuckle, “I will never actually be able to pay all that off. €500,000: it’s a cartoon figure.”
With every passing budget, things get tighter for John and his family. Although his gross salary of €60,000 sounds high, it’s his take-home pay that interests him. “In the last 18 months alone I’m down €1,000 a month. But my biggest fear is not the universal social charge or taxes — it’s the European Central Bank. If they start upping rates again I won’t be able to put food on the table.”
The daily grind takes its toll, confesses John. Bleary-eyed, he draws the curtains onto pitch dark mornings at 6am so he can be in work for 9am. “But if you get stuck coming into Roscommon, then it can take forever to get back out onto the N63. So if I leave after 7am the traffic is often terrible and I don’t get in on time.”
Staggering home from work around 7pm, John finds himself with little energy left to engage with his three children. Most evenings he just collapses onto the couch with a glass of wine, and tries his best to involve himself with the kids at weekends when he has more time.
Work-related stress is a growing problem for people with these marathon commutes, says John. “This is a time-bomb, if you ask me. I see myself and most of my colleagues. We’re knackered all the time. Ever since the Croke Park deal went through, workloads have ballooned. And it’s only going to get worse.”
But when he compares his with others’ situation, he sees himself as “lucky”. He can work from home one day a week, and has recently begun car-pooling with a colleague who also works in Galway to off-set some of the costs of the 250km commute.
Yet John admits he feels “embarrassed” that he bought into all the “orthodoxies” about property investment during the boom years, and this embarrassment explains why he will only speak about his situation off-the-record. In hindsight, John wishes he had never made some of his rash choices.
Shortly after a chance meeting with an old school friend in a pub in Leeson Street in Dublin in 2006, John was convinced to buy two apartments in a Bulgarian coastal town off the plans. As the market crashed in 2008, he swiftly offloaded the apartments, making a loss of €50,000. His school friend guaranteed him he would make a minimum €100,000 on the investment.
Nevertheless, this hasn’t stopped John from seeing the funny side to things. “There’s something surreal about living where I do now. There’s a guy in my estate, and he drives around in a 06-Reg Maserati sportscar. Bono drives a Maserati. And you have this guy in a Longford estate driving one. But he hasn’t lost his sense of humour. On the back windscreen is a bumper sticker: ‘Seemed like a good idea at the time’.”
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