I took these jobs in England as it means I can now nip back home

I took these jobs in England as it means I can now nip back home

1 June 2016

COUNTY Down’s oldest football club, Liatroim Fontenoys, was decimated by an exodus of tradesmen when the recession hit.

As the young sportsmen boarded flights to Australia in search of construction work, the team struggled to replace its senior players.

Twenty seven year-old Brian Owens was part of that exodus. A plumber by trade, he had qualified at just the wrong time and was soon sickened by the dearth of work.

Leaving home for Western Australia’s thriving industry in 2011, he spent the next five years among a massive community of fellow ex-pats, so large in numbers they wondered if anyone had been left behind to do the building work at home.

Brian is now part of a partial turn of the tide for these emigrant tradesmen, returning home part-time in exchange for a gruelling weekly commute to England.

It is with some irony, he says, that he has returned home to work for Castlewellan-based Kane Heating, the company with which he first served his time.

Joining the huge number of professional commuters, recently dubbed “semigrants” by researchers at University College Cork, manual workers like Brian are among hundreds hitting Northern Ireland’s ports and airports for the Monday exodus to London.

Content with the trade-off of a 400-mile commute in return for living back among their families in rural Down, playing alongside their old teammates and often working for companies they left because of the recession, he says for many the long haul to Australia was a stop-gap during the worst of the downturn.

“I went to Australia for the same reason as everybody else,” he recalls.

“Things weren’t great at home and started getting really tight. I had heard great reports of people making good money in Australia. I had team mates there and a brother so I thought I would give it a go.”

Working on farms four-and-a-half hours out of Perth, he said the good pay, decent weather and a thriving expat community, meant the following five years quickly passed.

“It was well paid and you could save plenty as there were so many add-ons to the job. I had a free house, vehicles and fuel was paid. It was very appealing lifestyle-wise,” he said.

“At home you had to chase people for money, it was not like that in Australia, it was not like work.

“There was so many of us there and a lot of people from around the north we got to know.

“Every trade you could imagine was there and we did wonder if there were that many of us on Australian sites who was doing the work at home.”

After his visa expired and following a trip to New Zealand to explore work opportunities, Brian said he was unexpectedly drawn home by a job offer in England.

“I would say 90 per cent of us intended to come home eventually as it was never supposed to be long term,” he said.

Admitting the lure of a good “chippie” was almost as big as the appeal of returning to his roots, Brian joked that he decided to come back home because Australians just couldn’t grasp the technique of a decent fish supper.

“But it wasn’t just the food,” he said. “I thought I would take the job in England with my original employer who is now doing most work over the water because it means I can nip back and forward home.

“Now I am in London I see I am with half of Ireland again. A lot of friends I made in Australia are coming back this way because things are picking up, but the work is in London so that is where they go.”