A New Life: Duncan Healy tells Claire O'Connell the family farm is the only place to bring up children
Five years ago Duncan Healy came home from a holiday in New Zealand to find his job was gone. The Dublin-based e-business company that had employed him as a software programmer had liquidated the day before his return.
"It was a bit of a shock to the system," he says. "You didn't really expect that kind of thing to happen."
It was a surprise that sowed the seeds of a change in Healy's mind. He went on to work elsewhere in the computer industry, but he also nurtured contingency plans to get out of the business.
His journey to New Zealand had been fruitful in other ways. He had gone to escape the stress of his doomed job, and while touring around South Island he met a travelling companion from Taiwan who would later become his wife. Hsin-chi also worked in computers and their relationship blossomed when she moved to England to study.
When they started a family in 2002, Healy felt the time was right to move back and work on his parents' farm near Kiltegan in Wicklow.
"With computers it's all well and good, but at the same time if I was having a family I'd always wanted to come back here and live on the farm because the space and the quality of life is very good for the family," he says.
Healy's father Denis set up the organic farm in the early 1980s when Duncan was at primary school.
"The plan was always to go farming organic," says Healy, who pitched in along with the rest of the family, pinning turnips and washing vegetables, and became aware first-hand of the hard work involved in farming.
"The business initially developed selling locally and then selling to supermarkets. Dad was getting up at three or four in the morning and driving to Dublin," he says.
At the same time, Healy developed an interest in computers, tinkering with any rudimentary models available. He went on to study mathematics at Trinity College Dublin but his interest in computers persisted.
"When I went to college it really took off in a big way because you had all these fun machines, like Unix machines, floating around, and for me it was only natural to play around with them and see what was possible."
In the mid-1990s, much-prized internet access at university meant Healy could watch the web take off. "At one stage you were practically able to keep track of all the websites as they were being released," he says. "So there was many a midnight hour spent surfing and generally exploring the web and seeing what was going on."
After college, he built up a successful career as a web and database designer. But when he and Hsin-chi had their first child, Healy felt the time was right to go back to his roots.
"It made sense for me to come out and get stuck into helping Dad on the farm because there is loads to do and also the markets were getting very busy," he says.
The Healys now sell organic fruit and vegetables at several Dublin and Leinster markets every week and supply produce for online orders through the Ballybrado website, www.ballybrado.com.
Healy says he is not surprised by the public's increasing interest in organic food. "In a sense I always expected there was a demand for good quality, healthy food," he says. "It doesn't make sense to me to be lashing dozens of chemicals on the earth and then expecting 10 years down the line not to be having side effects."
Healy has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the produce he grows and sells.
"When you are exposed to it from a young age, and you are surrounded by books - Dad read anything he could on it - it's only natural that you build up the knowledge," he says, adding that he enjoys the markets where customers can give him feedback.
It's a system he believes in to the core. "You have to espouse it and believe it because if you don't, why on earth are you doing it, so it's something that comes from very deep inside me that we should all be doing our bit," he says.
"You can't keep going and expecting things to be sustainable if you are pumping out tonnes of plastic and throwing it in a tip the size of a mountain and expecting it to go away," he says. It doesn't go away, it stays around for generations to come and somebody has to deal with it.
"If we don't do something about it, how can we expect our kids to deal with the legacy? We don't want to be known as the generation that messed it up."
Healy says he still ticks over with the other passion in his life - computers - using them to manage the business, and he applies some of the more general skills he learned in the software industry to improve the running of the farm.
As Healy prepares to join in today's potato harvest, he muses on whether he would have done anything differently. "You can always look back and say if only I'd done this or that then you might have been a richer person, but that doesn't matter," he says. "As long as you are happy and you are living your life the way you feel it should be lived and you're doing as much as you can to help the environment or the people around you, whatever your calling is, then that's the main thing."