The super commuters who go to work by plane

The super commuters who go to work by plane

25 May 2016

DOWN District is at the centre of a commuting revolution.

Super-commuting tradesmen are routinely replacing their work vans for  weekly flights, boarding planes to take them hundreds, even thousands,  of miles to building sites in the UK and further afield.

The phenomenon of construction workers travelling up to five hours to the booming building sites of Scotland and England is now well rooted in Down District and is becoming a major issue across Ireland where the Dublin to London route has become the world’s second busiest internatonal airline route.

The Down Recorder has spent several months researching this trend of extreme commuting, previously the domain of white collar professionals, and over the next four weeks will examine how it came about, why tradesmen are happy to buy into it and the implications it has for life back at home.

This week we follow a group of workers from Saul who are collected on their company bus before dawn every Monday, arriving at their Scottish building site for a 10am start.

We will hear from their Saul employer, luxury home builder Michael Galloway, who will explain why local bosses are  tendering for work so far from home and why, once projects are secured, they are determined, like him, to export their own workers to these jobs.

The weeks ahead will include stories of family firms in Castlewellan and Downpatrick who negotiate the logistics of sending over 100 skilled workers overseas and the personal experiences of these men.

There will be the story of an entrepreneurial  Crossgar company which overcame daunting security measures, including the need for ransom insurance, for a high-end cabinetmaking job in war-torn Iraq.

A returning emigrant will explain why many local young tradesmen like him, who left home for Australia when the recession hit, are now happy to come home to their families even if it means spending their working week in London.

Finally, there will the stories of a local businessman who has launched his own company 400 miles from home, and the endearing story of a Strangford granny who commutes to London to babysit for her daughter.

• See our six-page special feature starting from pages 18-23.