Country Living with Francis Farragher

Curiouser and curiouser!” is a famous little quote from Lewis Carroll’s Alice as she pries into the world of wonderland while at the same being conscious that she wasn’t speaking good English.

In ways, it’s a bit like the dilemma we face each morning if we decide to tune into any the main news stations on our radios as we navigate a path to work, knowing full well that we’re going to get ‘bombed out of it’ by one catastrophe after another.

Of course, we all have out little solution and escape hatches, mine primarily being Marty Whelan whimsical mix of jollity, horrendously bad jokes [not all the time] and light music on Lyric FM.

There are times though, often when usual daily slog of work ceases, and maybe a ‘slow pint’ beside the fire in one of local hostelries, when I think to myself that on balance we don’t really live in such a bad part of the world at all.

Such thoughts are admittedly accompanied by a little measure of guilt when one thinks of the horrors being inflicted on people living in places like Gaza [the slaughter of the innocents], Ukraine, Syria and Sudan, but it also gives us a little perspective into the relative simplicity of our own day-to-day troubles.

We live in a country where there is essentially full employment – I’ve lost track of the number of people that have I met over recent months in different enterprises who said to me that they just couldn’t fill vacant job

I recall too a little piece on one of the region’s most successful companies – JFC Manufacturing in Tuam – which from very humble beginnings is now a major international company.

The ‘head bottlewasher’ – John Concannon – in reply to a question I asked him about the ongoing challenges of recruiting staff replied with a one word answer: “Australia.”

It is though a far different scenario from the Ireland of a generation ago when thousands had to ‘take the boat’ to Liverpool and Holyhead or further afield to places like America and Australia.

Then, it was a case of no work, little education and a future of tough physical work on the buildings for the men or in factories or service industries for the women.