Back Home: For Shane Hegarty, leaving Skerries in Co Dublin for the outside world proved too difficult a transition, so he has resolved to stay close to the tree he fell from
I know that this series is entitled Back Home, but this is a slight deviation from that. A return to Skerries would require me to have left it in the first place. I have not. I was born here, a twig on a family tree whose roots stretch deep into the sandy soil. I would say that I grew up here, although that would suggest that I have no more growing up to do. I still live here, more than comfortable in my insularity.
I did reside in Dublin City for a couple of years, but at the back of my mind knew that I was only ever on loan to the outside world. The outside world, meanwhile, quickly tired of how I compared everything in it to Skerries and kept checking its watch in anticipation of me turning around and going back there.
I already presume that I am likely to live here forever. When I visit my grandfather in a local nursing home, I catch myself noting which rooms have the best views and the shortest journey to the television room. When I visit the local graveyard I find myself scouting for the decent plots. There is one with an excellent view of the rugby pitch that would do nicely.
Skerries has always been well known as a welcoming seaside resort. Its name sends Dubliners of a certain vintage into paroxysms of nostalgia. Many of the houses along the seafront had a dwelling to the rear into which the entire family would move during the summer so that the home could be rented out to tourists visiting what was the Costa Brava of north Fingal. A holiday camp on Red Island entertained bonny babies and glamorous grannies until 1980. Even today, on particularly sunny days, the long south strand becomes dotted with windbreakers, behind which daytrippers with raspberry-ripple sunburn cower from an easterly breeze that blew in here many years ago and found it so pleasant that it decided to stay.
Skerries has developed a paunch over the years, with new housing estates shifting the balance of the town. The old village, however, has held on to its good looks. Although its arteries have become increasingly clogged with parked cars, its pulse is strong. It always posts a decent Tidy Towns score. Two magnificent windmills have recently been restored to full working order and stand at the top of the town. They were once crumbling icons of what Skerries used to be, and while they still represent the town's past they also point towards its future and reflect its contemporary civic pride.
Elsewhere, the houses and pubs along the narrow harbour road are painted in various primary colours. When the sun shines the view from the hills outside the town is so dazzling that a romantic soul might believe that God himself is pointing the way.
Which would be generous of him, given that the town gave a shaky first impression. On his journey up the Irish coast, St Patrick stopped off at one of the three islands off Skerries. The pagan locals waited for him to nip off for a spot of evangelising, before they rowed to the island, stole his goat and had an impromptu barbecue. So annoyed was Patrick upon his return, that he is said to have reached the mainland in two giant strides.
Legend has it that when the locals tried to deny any knowledge of the incident they opened their mouths to find that they could only bleat like a goat. Only when they were prepared to tell the truth did Patrick return their voices to them.
Always mindful of the tourism potential, Skerries celebrated the experience, adopted the goat as its mascot and named next to everything after the saint.
It is claimed that St Patrick's footprint can still be found at a local swimming area. If it is his, it confirms our patron saint to have been possessed of at least one small, possibly clubbed foot.
I married a Skerries girl. When we decided to buy a house, we found ourselves looking for a home in all the wrong places. Old council houses subsiding in the shadow of Croke Park. The vast, half-finished estates of west Dublin, where popping out for the local paper required packing enough provisions for three days in case you took a wrong turn on the way back. We came frighteningly close to buying a house we didn't want, in a town we didn't want to live in.
Skerries, though, must have realised our distress, sensed that two of its children had become detached from the tribe, because at the last minute a house came on the market in the town. The moment we signed for it, it felt like some balance had been restored to our internal gyroscopes.
We live in a new housing development as big and dusty as those that had intimidated us elsewhere and in which it is not unusual to find half-mad, bearded delivery-men who have become quite lost. It is built on old farmland beside a house in which my late-grandmother lived and from which the relentless cry of a corncrake used to keep me awake when I stayed with her as a child.
That sound has been replaced by the regular call of the common house alarm. The land, however, is still bounteously fertile and any plant will flourish in it except, I have discovered, those planted by my hand.
If we crane our necks out of the upstairs windows, we have a glimpse of the sea. Step outside and we can hear it roaring its authority. When we turn the corner onto the coast road there is the sight of the distant Mourne Mountains piled on the horizon; the same view that inspired Percy French to write the famous song. From there, we can stroll along the sea wall, through the older streets of the town and along the beach to the harbour.
On the perfect day, you can sit on the harbour wall across from Joe May's bar, sheltered from the breeze and toasted by the sun, with a drink in the hand, your toes in the water and seals swimming so close that you could pop a beach ball on one of their noses.
Some day, somebody will do a study on the number of man-hours lost to the Irish economy because of those who choose a day of indolence along Skerries harbour over one in the office, and it will lead to a major revision of the nation's economic history.
