‘Growing up’ in Mullingar in your mid-30s

(Above) Westmeath Examiner journalist Rodney Farry with his twin boys, Donnacha and Senan.

It’s probably too early to say where the last decade will rank in the annals of Mullingar’s long history in terms of importance, but from a personal perspective it will undoubtedly go down as the most significant.

When I joined the Westmeath Examiner’s editorial team in September 2010, the town, like the rest of the country, was in the middle of the worst recession in the history of the state and the heady days of the Celtic Tiger seemed like a million years ago.

The previous year I had been made redundant when the paper I worked in, The Leitrim Post, closed without warning. Like hundreds of thousands of others during that dark period I had to dust myself off and come up with a Plan B, which for me entailed returning to NUI Maynooth at the age of 33 to do a post-grad in IT, one of the few sectors in the Irish economy that was in good health.

After completing the year-long course and securing a ‘first’ for the first time in my up to then exceedingly mediocre academic career, I began to look for work. First thing each morning I would dutifully look in the IT section of the different recruitment websites, but I was always drawn to the media vacancies, where the pickings were always a lot slimmer.

I think it was my sister-in-law and fellow journalist Aisling who told me about a vacancy at the Westmeath Examiner. Although the media sector was one of the worst affected by the recession and the print newspaper industry was, and still is, trying to come to grips with where its future lies in the digital age, I was still eager to resume my journalism career if at all possible.

Thankfully, I got one of the few journalism jobs that was going anywhere in 2010 and quickly settled into my new working life in ‘The Examiner’, as it’s known locally.

One of the first things that struck me when I began working in Mullingar, aside from the warmth of its people, was that while it was undoubtedly suffering from the recession like everywhere else, the centre still had a vibrancy that was missing from many provincial towns, where most of the commercial activity had moved to retail parks during the boom.

Mullingar was and is home to a variety of independent retailers, which gives it its own unique atmosphere. There may have been empty units but the number of vacancies was significantly fewer than in many other towns and thankfully this remains the case today.

After six months of commuting from Dunshaughlin, I and my then-fiancée, soon to become wife Siobhan, moved to Mullingar in the spring of 2011. Unlike today, it was very much a renters’ market at the time.

Not only was there an abundance of apartments and houses to choose from, but rents were also relatively low, at least compared to the boom years.

The first event that made the 2010s so personally momentous took place on New Year’s Eve, 2011 when Siobhan and I got married.

If I’m honest, despite being 36 at the time, I view it as the day I became a fully-fledged adult. Up until then, I had spent a significant chunk of the previous 18 years trying to avoid life-altering responsibility of any kind.

My avoidance tactics included spending most of the first half of the noughties teaching English in South Korea; a worthwhile pursuit in many ways in and of itself but, for me at least, definitely a postponement of real life.

Once married, it didn’t take me long to acquire many of adulthood’s other trappings including children, our first, Grace, arrived in May 2013, and a mortgage a few months after Grace’s birth.

In April 2017, we welcomed Grace’s brothers Donnacha and Senan into our world, which suddenly became a whole lot busier and noisier.

Fast forward to January 2020 and the boys have fully embraced the terrible twos and everything that goes with it for us, their poor, sleep-deprived parents!

In between Grace’s and the boys’ arrivals, our son Cormac was stillborn at 34 weeks in late 2015. Nothing can prepare you for the pain and trauma of a tragedy of this magnitude.

The best you can do is learn to live with your loss and try to live the best possible and most productive lives that you can to honour their memory. Hopefully, we are managing to do that.

In parallel with my own vastly altered circumstances, Mullingar has also significantly changed over the last 10 years. While the much-trumpeted recovery took a long time to travel down the M4 from Dublin, in recent years the local economy has shown definite signs of improvement.

It may not tell the whole story but the fact there were 10,263 Westmeath people on the Live Register when I joined the Examiner in

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September 2010 compared to 4,332 at the end of November indicates that for many, but certainly not all, things are on an upward trajectory.

We have lived in Mullingar for almost a decade now and while to a certain extent we will always be outsiders – once a Leitrim man, always a Leitrim man – the ties that bind us to Mullingar grew a lot stronger when our children arrived and continued to strengthen when Grace started school in St Colman’s and started joining clubs (H’up St Loman’s).

Cormac’s passing has also sadly strengthened our link to the town as we now have a family member buried in Ballyglass Cemetery and whatever happens in the future a piece of us will always remain in Mullingar.

When we told friends and family that we were moving to the town way back in 2010, a few made riot-related jokes, the criminal actions of a small minority in Dalton Park in 2008 still being fresh in people’s minds.

However, 10 years on and many of those family members are firm ‘Mullingarophiles’ – excuse my creation of a new word – and genuinely look forward to their visits to the town.

When you are born and reared in a place, you can become immune to its charms but from its first class amenities such as the greenway and Royal Canal, to its thriving arts centre and a multitude of sporting clubs and organisations, Mullingar has plenty to offer, young and old.

As for us, we are more than content to raise our family here, which I think is about the greatest seal of approval anyone can give a place.