Life in 2015 - Business As Usual

I'm a knowledge worker with Microsoft Ireland. about the only thing that is not change for me in the last ten years is the company I work for. In 2005 I was a techie working in Dublin and commuting three hours every day. Now I live in a small village outside Tralee in County Kerry and commute to my purpose built office next door.

We build this luxury eco home on the age of the village looking out to sea in 2007, just before the end of housing boom. Like everyone else, we moved our money out of Irish property and into Eastern Europe and I think this is what caused a soft landing for the property market. Even in 2007 we could see that energy prices were only going to go up so we put in all latest technology to make our house really efficient and we find it costs no more to run than our neighbours little house built by a local developer.

We chose this area because it is unspoiled. None of the big farmers have managed to buy the land here, or don't want it! It is mostly mountain and small fields. The problem is, the local farmers don't seem to have much interest in keeping the farms tidy, so some areas are starting to look run down. The village has kept its quaint old Irish look, even though many of the people living here are now Chinese! We try to buy something in local shop each week to show we support the village, but with LIdl doing free delivery with online ordering, it's usually own a litre of milk or the newspaper on Sunday.