Ciaran Wright, Ballycogley
Ciaran Wright is due to become a father for the first time in June of this year. And although he is happy for his child to be born in Australia, he hopes that its formative years will be spent back home, in Ireland.
‘I expect to stay in Australia for a few more years, but we would expect to return home before the baby starts national school. While Australia is a great place for a child to be brought up in, it will never be Wexford and it will never be home,’ Ciaran says.
And their decision to have the baby in Sydney has caused some heartache for both his and partner Caoimhe’s families.
‘It will be hard, starting a family out here without any family support. And it’s the first grandchild on both Caoimhe’s and my side of the family, so the grandparents are not happy. But when we weighed up the options, it was a easy decision to stay here.’
The main contributory factor in their decision is work-related, and it was for those reasons that Ciaran left Wexford in 2010.
‘At the time I wasn’t working so I decided I would chance Sydney for a year. And at the time I really thought a year was the most I would do,’ he says.
Upon arrival he quickly realised that Australia was, in many ways, a home from home.
‘I went with Darren Foran from Rosslare, and we already knew a lot of people out here. One of the first things you realise when you land here is how big the Irish community is.
‘The GAA play a massive part in that and your club becomes like a family. A lot of Wexford people played with a club called Craobh Phadraigh. They were founded in 2003 by a Wexford man Shane O’Brien, who sadly passed away before Christmas.
‘So I joined up with them and am now the chairman of the club, and we still have lots of Wexford men and women with us.’
A common theme throughout these pieces has been the entreprenurial nature of Wexford ex-pats, their ability to enter a thriving economy and find ways to make it work for them.
And in that sense, Ciaran is no different. ‘I had come from a construction background, but decided I wanted to get into sales and I got a sales job straight away. I now currently have my own recruitment and labour hire company, so I suppose it’s a good mix of my construction and sales background. This is probably not something I would have achieved so young at home.’
Managing to get back home once a year, Ciaran and Caoimhe hope to bring their baby back to Ireland to meet its grandparents as soon as they can, and while they’re there the new father might get to experience something most of us would gladly give away for free.
‘You miss the craic and the sense of community that only Ireland has. In the last while I’ve even missed the cold mornings in Ireland.’