The Gill family has perfected the art of tri-location. Husband Peter lives in Sweden, wife Anna and children live in Westport, Co Mayo, yet for them all, home is a weekend cottage on Clare Island.
Their travel arrangements would make an air traffic controller's head spin. Five or six times a year, Peter (51) commutes from Gavle, 100 miles north of Stockholm, where he is associate professor of the education department, to Dublin, and then drives west. "I can get from Gavle to Dublin in five hours, but then it takes me another five hours simply to get across to Westport," he says.
Every weekend, Anna and their three children - UCC student Olof (18) and Louisburgh schoolboys Eric (13) and Bjorn (15) - take the ferry from Westport to Clare Island, where they bask in the island's ever-changing panorama until the return ferry on Sunday afternoon.
Technology has made things easier. For instance, Peter can work remotely, tutoring his students, mostly post-grads, via email. "The concept of distance education is very acceptable in Sweden. I lectured my students from a tele-conferencing studio in Furbo, Co Galway last week. In fact, this lecture was then further relayed to distance students in Falkoping Education Centre," he says.
Their complicated living arrangements are not the only unusual aspect to the Gills. The couple met when Anna, short for her full Swedish name of Annalena, was visiting Ireland while studying social science at Goteborg University. It was the summer of 1971; they met across a crowded bar. The Pembroke Inn in Dublin, to be exact.
Anna was smitten by Irish literature, Irish music in the shape of The Dubliners, and Irish men. "Most importantly, Irish bearded men. I love beards," she says.
Cork-born Peter, who had just completed a second master's degree at Trinity, had earned a certain fame as the joint author of a thesis which disproved a theory current at the time that people of Irish and black African descent were less intelligent than people of other origins. "Experts prove `stupid Irish' claim false" ran the headlines.
Since then, the Gills' relationship has survived everything, including a dramatic sea rescue in the summer of 1981. Anna was winched to safety by a Danish rescue helicopter while Peter and his father Mick were battling to keep their 26-foot Swedish traditional craft Kajsa off the rocks of the rugged Swedish coast.
The rescue crew offered to lift Peter and Mick off as well, but the offer was flatly refused and father and son managed to ride the storm, finding shelter off a small island the following morning.
The view from the first-floor living room of the Gills' Clare Island house is breathtaking. Achill's high cliff-face stands to the north, the untameable Atlantic roars to the west, the maze of Clew Bay's islands lies to the east.
The couple first fell in love with the island in 1978, when they came up with the idea of buying the island's famous lighthouse. '
"It was one of those incredibly calm, crisp November days," remembers Anna, as she tidies away some papers connected with her job as a team leader with the Western Health Board. That first day, they came across local man Michael Joe O'Malley, who impressed Anna with references to Swedish authors, some of whom she had never heard of.
A later discovery of the full text of Robert Lloyd Praeger's Clare Island Survey in Goteborg University sealed the decision to buy a home there.
The lighthouse proved outside their price range but, on discovering that hotel owner Chris O'Grady had a cottage for sale, they bought it instead. The Mill Cottage had been the home of the island's chief, John Ned O'Malley, famed as a raconteur of incorrigible imagination. Anna finds this wholly appropriate. "The first time Peter and I met, he talked non-stop for 12 hours," she says.
Anna grew up in the security of a progressive and liberated Sweden. "It's been like deja-vu living in the Ireland of the 1990s. My upbringing was in a liberated, egalitarian society that cherished all its citizens. When Peter first moved to Sweden, I was living in a commune. We were mainly Trotskyites."
Peter is announcing that the ferry is leaving at 4 p.m. It's Sunday afternoon and it's time to return to their Westport home. The boys are summoned, bags must be hurriedly packed, it's October and the wind is getting up. As I leave to walk the two miles to the quay, Peter is shouting: "I suppose Sweden is a great place to be born, but Ireland's still the best place in the world to die".
