Losing your job is traumatic, but it’s not the end – for proof just look to Michael Creagh, who was made redundant last year but will be taking his seat as an Oscar nominee in LA this weekend
ANYONE CONSIDERING a career change at a certain point in their life faces the same question: is it too late? For many, the economic downturn has made that thought inevitable. Yet whether redundancy forces or inspires people to start over, there’s a lot more at stake the later that second chance comes.
ADVERTISING TO FILM-MAKING
Michael Creagh thought he was “a goner” after being made redundant as art director of an advertising agency last year. Even a few weeks ago, things weren’t looking particularly good for the 36-year-old – but then he was unexpectedly nominated for an Oscar.
“I feel very weird,” he says. “It seems so outside your experience when something like this comes knocking. You just get taken along in its wave.”
Before he lost his job, Creagh spent his spare time making a short film called The Crush about a pupil’s affection for his teacher. He shot it in Skerries, and it stars his eight-year-old son Oran in the lead role. Though Creagh had no film-making experience, and funded the project himself, he’d gleaned an economy of storytelling from making advertisements.
“My finances went, like so many other people, into crisis mode. Luckily the film was made and it couldn’t be taken off me. There would have been no way in the past year I could have even thought about doing it.”
Searching for freelance work meant registering as self-employed, which affected his welfare entitlement and created added pressure to support his three children.
“It’s hard. There are times you just think you’re going to lose it. You’re holding on by your fingernails and you haven’t paid things. But it’s strange: even when things feel rock bottom, something does come along.”
Creagh is now in a good position to develop other film ideas, write screenplays and direct commercials but, he stresses, he’s still open to offers of work. “All this awards business doesn’t actually earn you anything. In fact it’s costing me for travel. I’m not taking it for granted or supposing it leads to anywhere. But I can only hope.”
BANKER TO BUTCHER
When Brian O’Leary left a lucrative job as a foreign exchange trader in 2007, few people understood.
“They thought I was off my rocker,” he says. “Those same people have subsequently called me looking for a job. Most of them are traders, so that says it all.”
After 13 years at AIB and Anglo Irish, the intensity drained O’Leary, who is 36. He’d be up in the middle of the night, preoccupied with currencies and Japanese stocks, knowing his employers would “take 90 per cent” of whatever he made.
Instead he set up a currency hedge-fund that fared poorly. “It was around the time the arse fell out of the world,” he says. “All the money dried up. I packed it in. For a while I wracked my brains looking for something to do . . . but it was staring me in the face.”
His father and brother ran a successful butchers, Dublin Meat Company, and he had been approached about developing the business. Having helped out at Christmas for years, it made sense for O’Leary to step in and open a third branch in Swords. Now he can’t see himself doing anything else.
“You’re still thinking about where you’re going to make the next few quid from. Like, ‘how am I going to sell the chicken fillets?’ But it’s 10 times better. You benefit from every cent and it’s a family operation. I wouldn’t go back for a million euro.”
RETAIL TO TEACHING/STAY-AT-HOME FATHER
While working in Temple Bar’s Borderline record shop, Dave Kennedy and Julie Collins began a relationship and, after a tough day at work, decided to open Road Records in 1997.
By 2008, the landscape of music retail had change irrevocably and, following a poor Christmas and the birth of their first child, they decided to close.
“I had been considering my options for a long time,” says Collins. “In retrospect, maybe I could say I saw the writing on the wall. I decided to do a TEFL course, thinking ‘if anything ever goes wrong at least I could fall back on this’.”
But Dublin’s music scene wouldn’t let them close. A support campaign kept the shop going and Kennedy put everything he had into making it work. “I really thought we were going to see it through,” he says with a sigh. “I felt pretty positive we’d turned a corner. I didn’t think it was going to get worse, which it did. It finally dawned on me that rather than trying to battle it, we just had to give up.”
Although they were selling more CDs than ever over the past year, they were at a lower price. They decided to close again quickly rather than let debts accumulate.
Collins now teaches part-time, relishing the challenge. “It’s a very different type of job satisfaction,” she says with a laugh. “You’d walk into the shop in the morning and the only thing you’d need to worry about was, ‘will I get coffee now or later?’
“I’m a people person; I’m quite nosey so while teaching is different it still fulfils the need I had in the shop.”
Kennedy, meanwhile, has been looking after their two-year-old son, Paddy, while developing a photography blog about the Phoenix Park and weighing up his options.
“It’s quite daunting,” he says. “It’ll be a long time before I want to get into anything to do with music or even retail again. But whereas before I was thinking things like, ‘is it me? Is it because I can’t order the right stuff?’ at least now I know I don’t have to face that for the rest of my life.”
CUSTOMER SERVICE MANAGER TO HEALTHCARE
It took two successive redundancies for Brian O’Connor to find his way. He had been in customer service since leaving college, working his way up to management level at IBM for 11 years. They were great employers, he says, and the perks were good but it didn’t feel right. The longer he was there, the less he saw himself staying in the job until retirement.
After voluntary redundancy presented an opportunity to leave, he took another job at Permanent TSB that ended in another redundancy last March. By then he realised he belonged in healthcare, an area he took an interest in as a teenager, and applied to do a Fetac level five course. But unable to afford it privately, it took O’Connor nine months to get FÁS funding, which meant depending on the support of his partner.
“It’s a big decision to make,” he says. “I was on fairly good money before, so to go from that to a [potentially] minimum-wage job changes your life. But I realised you need to work with your instincts when it comes to a job if you want it to be fulfilling.”
Healthcare is one of the few job sectors in Ireland with decent prospects, O’Connor says, and he hopes to look after the elderly when he completes his course in September.
“I’m 43 now so some people say I’m too old. I don’t think so. The way I see it, it’s an investment in my future because I’m going to be working for another 20 years and I want it to be something I’m happy doing. In that respect, the future’s very bright.”
