‘There’s 30 Irish people in Brandon, Canada. You miss the craic living in a small place’

In Manitoba in central Canada, temperatures fall as low at minus 40 degrees in the winter. If you are out and about, your eyelashes freeze, your nose hairs crack and frostbite can grip you within a minute, says Dubliner Jennifer Murray who now lives there with her family.

“I laugh when people tell me they are suffering because of snow in Ireland. Since we moved here over a decade ago, my children have only missed one day of school because of the weather. You manage fine if you prepare, if you wear the right gear and boots and keep your car plugged in so your engine doesn’t seize up and your battery doesn’t die. There will often be sunny blues skies at the same time so it’s not like that damp cold that gets into your bones as it does in Ireland.”

Life in Canada has been good for Murray, her husband Mark and the three children they are raising there.

An experienced travel trade professional and tourism marketing graduate, she balances a career working part-time for Irish firm Tour America with other business and personal interests, including her own start-up baby bag venture.

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Mark, meanwhile, has been able to develop his trade as a welder, adding Canadian qualifications to the ones he achieved in Ireland to enhance his career.

The couple moved to Canada towards the end of the last Irish recession when there was a big downturn in the construction industry. Both secured jobs quickly. “Canada has been very good for us. It is like the US in that if you work hard and you show initiative, you can do very well here.”

In recent years, Murray teamed up with one of her former employers, Irish travel agency Tour America, when the firm’s founder, Mary McKenna, was looking for someone to act as a customer-service representative on the ground in North America.

Among other duties for the firm, she acts as the agency’s emergency contact person if people are experiencing any difficulties on their holidays. Murray typically starts working at 5am each morning or 11am Irish time.

“If someone is stuck somewhere, like Newark airport going on to Orlando and their flight is cancelled and the airline isn’t offering them a hotel, that’s the type of situation where I can step in. I can contact the airline and get them help, rather than them standing in a queue for hours not knowing what is happening.

“I am a problem solver; I thrive in challenging situations and I’m on the same or similar time zone as most of our travellers when they are in America.”

While most people enjoy incident-free holidays, accidents and sicknesses involving hospitalisation become issues for some and severe weather events, such as hurricanes, can disrupt the best-made plans of holidaymakers. Outages in airline IT systems, such as those that affected Aer Lingus in recent years, are among the other issues that Murray has helped passengers deal with.

Hearing an Irish voice at the other end of a line is reassuring, she says, noting that travellers who book through an agency have a lot more rights and protections under EU package travel regulations than DIY travellers who book their own flights and accommodation.

Murray has an entrepreneurial side too. When she was expecting her third child, she noticed that there was no bag that contained all of the toiletries a mother would need when going to a maternity hospital to deliver a baby. She launched Dottie & Grace, designing an appropriate bag and filling it with all the required products.

What started as a hobby during Covid has now grown into a significant business, with Murray selling the bags online and in several retail stores in Canada.

The province of Manitoba is vast, consisting of around 12 times the land area of Ireland and Britain combined. It is sparsely populated, with only around 1.4 million inhabitants, around half of who live in the capital Winnipeg.

The family live in the town of Brandon, which has a population of around 50,000 (locals call it a city), but Murray says they could be tempted to move to a more populated part of Canada in the future.

“In Toronto or Vancouver, you get your Irish fix. There’s around 30 Irish people in Brandon and we all know each other. There is a good family orientated quality of life here, with winter sports, for example, but you miss the social side and the craic, living in a relatively small place.”

Murray and her family return to Ireland once or twice every year. She misses the friendliness of her home country, a point that resonates when she lands in Dublin Airport.

“Your point of entry into a country tells you a lot and a smile goes a long way. When I come to Ireland with my family, the people at passport control use our first names and make us feel very welcome. You just don’t get that here.”