The trek to the workplace is getting longer and more expensive. Iva Pocock reports.

Commuting in 21st century Ireland is almost as miraculous a process as changing lead into gold, the 17th century meaning of the verb. Gone are the days of travelling a few miles from the suburbs into the city centre.

Now a worker can wake up with one set of weather conditions, neighbours, possibly even dominant language, and, after a bit of breakfast, a shower, and a dose of RTÉ giving way to Newstalk on the car radio, find themselves a different person in a different world . . . the dirty old town.

Ms Michelle Gallagher, an employee benefits consultant in Adelaide Road, Dublin, travels approximately four hours every day by car, train, foot and bus, leaving at 7.10 a.m.

She has a seven-minute drive from home to Dundalk station, where she leaves her car before catching the 7.19 a.m. train to Dublin.

She gets off at Pearse Street station and catches the bus to work, arriving at 8.45 a.m. In the evening she walks from work to the station, catches the train and has her car waiting at Dundalk station.

"It's fine when everything is on time but by Friday I'm very tired," she confesses. When asked why she commutes, she says she recently bought a house in Dundalk mainly because of the price but also because she wanted to be back in her hometown.

Ms Gallagher's journey is testimony that commuting is now, in the words of Mr Patrick Shiels, an urban geographer with the faculty of the built environment, DIT, "a lot more complex" and "a lot more long distant".

As he and co-author Brendan Williams write in a recent publication of the Journal of Urban Studies, Irish commuting patterns have become increasingly US in style, where traditional suburb to central city radial patterns have been replaced by suburb to suburb travel.

This trend is "exemplified by increasing levels of traffic congestion on the central axis of Dublin's edge city, the M50 motorway".

"Commuting is greatly increasing because of the absence of affordable housing and the resultant mismatch between where people live and where the jobs are," says Mr Shiels.

Indeed, Dublin commuting is no longer simply from suburbs but from towns, both large and small, in neighbouring counties Wicklow, Kildare and Meath, as well as outer Leinster counties, especially Louth and Westmeath.

As reported in The Irish Times last month, preliminary analysis of 2002 census figures indicates that the level of population movement to counties around Dublin is "unprecedented for this country", according to Dr Aidan Punch, senior statistician with the Central Statistics Office, although analysis of where people "work, what job they do, how far they travel to work, what means of transport they use" has yet to be completed.

However, the increase in commuting from the outer Leinster counties to Dublin can be exemplified by a 257 per cent increase in new car registrations between 1994 and 2000 for this region compared to Wicklow, Kildare and Meath.

There was a massive 634 per cent increase for Louth.

An increase of 142 per cent in average daily passenger figures on the Dublin to Dundalk rail commuter service took place between 1993 and 1997, according to CIÉ.

Another rail commuter is Ms Deborah Nolan. Her working day can be almost 14 hours long if she misses the 7 p.m. train from Dublin back to Drogheda. An administration officer based in Clondalkin, she leaves home at 6.30 a.m., drives 10 minutes to Drogheda station, takes the train to Tara Street and then the bus to work. Like Ms Gallagher she says by Friday she is "pretty wrecked".

Also exhausted by commuting is marine biologist Mr Dave Millard, who says it "nearly hospitalised" him over the last 18 months. He drives an 84-mileroundtrip from west Wicklow to Bord Iascaigh Mhara in Dún Laoghaire.

Mr Shiels believes that "despite local authorities trying to increase housing densities and the policy objective of having mixed development, the outward spread of the city has gone so far that these policy objectives will only have a marginal effect".

Mr Barry Colleary, of the Dublin Transportation Office, says the reality is that long distance commuting is "inevitably always going to be with us in one form or other as it's easy to change the jobs but not houses".