Edel Coffey on Her Journey from Dublin to Galway

What makes a place a home? Is it the place itself, the geographical coordinates of latitude and longitude? Or is it something less easy to pin down than a point on a map? Does home have more to do with family or culture, community or the memories laid down by the generations who went before us? It’s possibly a combination of all of these things but in over eight years of living in my new home of Galway, I have come to realise that home can sort of creep up on you.

I switched my home from Dublin to Galway overnight in 2015, but the mental switch took considerably longer. For a long time, in my head I was just biding my time, treading water in this new place. 

Sometimes I felt so homesick, I’d lie awake in the middle of the night and worry that if I died I would end up buried in Galway and not there, where I belonged, in Dublin.

I’d wake my husband then, just to remind him that if I did happen to expire before the morning, could he please make sure to repatriate my body to Dublin. 

This is how deep our affiliations with places run. It’s why it can be so hard to let go. But making a new home away from your home of homes, your family, and your place of origin, doesn’t have to mean letting go. You can come from somewhere and find a sense of belonging elsewhere. 

Gradually, and almost without realising it, Galway has started to feel like my elsewhere home. I’ve made friends, I’ve come to know the backroads, the rhythms of the traffic lights, the ways of the people and the rules of engagement.

I’ve come to appreciate the local ritual of walking the prom and have even been persuaded to kick the wall at the end. I no longer carry an umbrella (locals know, as do I now, that they are useless against Galway rain).

I haven’t been brave enough yet to take the plunge and go sea swimming off Blackrock’s Diving Tower, but I have sipped coffee and held the towels while friends have taken their turns in the icy waters. I appreciate the benefits of the slower pace of life that Galway affords me, the sense of separation and seclusion that kicks in once you cross the natural barrier that is the river Shannon. I adore how close I am to nature, to the sea, to the wild beauty of Connemara. 

Now when I think about returning to Dublin, the ‘when’ has been replaced with a more ambiguous ‘if’. I’ll always be a Dubliner at heart and I still take every opportunity for a trip back. Okay, so it may take me an hour to get across Galway City to the motorway if I want to drive to Dublin, but perhaps that’s just Galway’s way of telling me that this is home now.