Embarking on the Rural Resettlement Scheme is a challenge for any urban family, but with a brood of nine Valerie Maxwell and her husband Michael really put their ambition, stamina and patience to the test.

It's now four years since the Maxwell family made the move from Ballyfermot to Ballyshrule, just four miles outside Portumna, Co Galway. They had eight children at the time, seven boys and a girl, ranging in age from 14 years right down to 18 months. Number nine has arrived since then - Russell now aged two-and-a-half.

"We'd always said we'd move down the country sometime," Valerie says. "Rural resettlement was our opportunity."

However, making the move was a lengthier process than they expected. In fact, although the Maxwells are living in Galway four years now, it's a full 10 years since they first became involved in the scheme.

"We were on the waiting list about six years," says Valerie. "Having so many children we had to wait for the right house to come up." Valerie was pregnant with the twins, who are 10 this week, and recalls worrying that the move to the west might coincide with the birth. "I would have been early into the pregnancy, I remember thinking that if we moved down I could be miles away from a hospital." She needn't have worried: "I just didn't imagine it could take so long."

Eventually a house was found, but Valerie was still anxious about the move. "I was worried about how the kids would settle, that they would miss their friends or that out of the whole lot of them one wouldn't like it and would upset the whole apple cart." She thinks the delay in finding the house may, in the end, have helped the children to adjust.

"We had a long time to talk to them about it. They knew that their friends could come down and visit once we were settled in and that has worked out very well."

She was particularly concerned about Joanna, their only girl. "Joanna didn't have a sister to share it with. We thought she might be lonely, but she was very quick to make new friends. We have them come over at the weekend and she goes to their houses too."

Despite the initial worries, Valerie was always confident that they made the right move. "Up where we lived there was no place left for kids to play."

Michael and Valerie were both born and raised in Ballyfermot and say that when they were children things were very different. "When we were growing up it was all fields behind us - you had somewhere to go to play and it was safe to play. But that's all gone now and there's just houses and factories all around." Life in Ballyfermot, she says, got to the point where she feared for her own safety and couldn't in conscience raising her children there.

"The drugs were always so handy up in Dublin. Michael and myself used to see kids, young lads the same age as our own, staggering around. If I had stayed up in Dublin and any of them had got in trouble, I never would have forgiven myself." Valerie also felt that by moving to a small rural community she was giving her children a better chance in school. "There are just under 500 pupils in Portumna Community College and they are always running extra courses to help the kids, especially coming up to the exams," she says. "They never really had a one-to-one with the teachers when we lived in Dublin. They wouldn't have had the same attention."

Looking back at it now, Valerie thinks she was "almost afraid" to approach the teachers in Ballyfermot. "We didn't know them and we didn't look at them as friends as we do with the teachers here."

The Maxwells have now bought their own house, which they moved into just four weeks ago - something, Valerie says, they could never have afforded to do in Dublin.

"We have a much better lifestyle now than if we were in Dublin. We're hoping to grow our own vegetables - the kids are really into that and Derek is mad to get chickens when the garden is sorted out." Nothing, Valerie says, could persuade her to return to Dublin now. "If they built me a 10-bedroom house up in Dublin, I wouldn't go back. We all love it here. Russell was born down here. This place is our home now."