GAA man’s return to the land Down Under

PAT O’Brien always looked forward with a great sense of anticipation to Clooney-Quin’s championship encounters. A passionate GAA fanatic, he cherished all their success at adult and underage level. However, this time things were different.
Standing on the sideline watching Clooney-Quin cross sticks with near neighbours and rivals O’Callaghan’s Mills in June 1987, Pat’s mind was miles away – in fact hundreds of thousands of miles away.
Having won the Clare Intermediate Hurling title in 1986, Clooney-Quin’s clash with the ’Mills was their first outing in the senior championship.
However, Pat couldn’t even stay until the final whistle to see how his beloved club fared. During the half-time cuppa, the 19-year-old grabbed his bags and made a frantic dash to Shannon Airport for his flight to Australia.
He stayed for about six years working in a number of different jobs from 1987 to 1993 Down Under. His first job involved scaffolding and farm work and he also helped make a haulage road for an iron ore mine in Pannawonica for McMahon Construction.
All the employees had to work 16 weeks on 12 hours a day seven days a week before they got one week off. Working conditions are better now with most construction employees getting one week off after a four-week stint.
With 45C° of blistering sun on your back, working on the haulage route was tough. Only six out of the 66 who started this job were still there six months later when the road was completed. Pat stayed with McMahon’s and moved on to work on making a new dam for a gold mine in Boddington, South of Perth in Western Australia and stayed for a number of months in Pinjarra.
His next work assignment was with Shamrock Shuttering, managed by John Frawley from Kilmaley and they combined very effectively on a tug-of-war team, which won a number of WA titles in the Royal Show in Perth Western Australia.
Pat also played hurling with Pádraig Kelly, Ruan, (who teaches in the Ennis Boys’ National School) for Western Australia in the state games against a Syndey side with six Kilkenny players back in 1987.
Interested in all types of GAA, Pat also played Gaelic football with Morley in Perth for years.
While Pat’s involvement with GAA teams helped him to make new friends and valuable work contacts, it also cost him one of his first jobs when he took an unscheduled day off to play a hurling game with Western Australia against New South Wales in September 1987.
This proved to be only a temporary hiccup and after his work with McMahon’s, he came back to Perth in 1988, where he met and fell in love with his wife-to-be Colette, a sister of Clare County Councillor Pat Burke, while they were socialising in the Irish club.
Having witnessed the demolition of a 10-storey high rise building, Pat was one of the hundreds of people who helped construct a replacement 52-storey high building in QVI.
For over two years, the Quin plumber did farm and scaffolding construction work on various other jobs including car parks.
There was little or no demand for his own skill set as there are no radiators or hot water, storage tanks in Australian houses.
Pat had only returned from Quin three weeks in 1991 when his mother, Margaret O’Brien (45) died. That was one of his saddest trips home and he took about three weeks off for her funeral.
Colette and Pat bought a two-bedroom apartment in Perth, rented it out and decided to leave Australia and return to Quin “for a year”. They got married in the Lakeside Hotel, Ballina, Killaloe on April 17, 1993.
Their plans changed dramatically when Colette took up a nursing post in the Mid-Western Regional Hospital, Limerick and Pat got a plumbing and maintenance job with Lenmac Construction, who were working in the University of Limerick thanks to John Lenihan from Kilkishen.
After spending five years with Lenmac, Pat decided to start his own plumbing business in 1998, despite his own reservations about missing the construction boom.
His decision was made easier by an offer of two days work a week, from another plumber, Frank Fitzgerald from Stonehall. Their friendship stretched back to their early days in Australia when they worked on a haulage road for an iron ore mine in Pannawonica.
His fears proved unfounded as the advent of the construction splurge during the so-called Celtic Tiger about 10 years ago resulted in a huge demand for plumbing work. At one stage, Pat employed 10 people, eight full-time and two subbies and had three vans on the road.
However, he had to lay off his employees in stages as work started to decline and practically dried up overnight as a result of the economic crash, which was most noticeable after builders’ holidays ended at the end of August Bank Holiday weekend in 2008.
Former employees like Mark Littleton now working in New Zealand, Pa Reynolds, a former Clooney-Quin player and coach, who is working in Syndey. Michael Lynch is in Canada while Paudie Ward, is one of the few plumbers who remained at home in the parish.
Having spent some time working on his own, Pat returned to work with Lenmac for about two years from January 2009 to January 2011.
His second departure from Quin to Australia was prompted by a twist of fate and happened by accident more than design. Having attended a going -away party for Clooney-Quin vice-chairman, Ronan Gallagher, who is now working as an accountant in Syndey where he lives with his girlfriend, Pat got talking to a few friends from Galway who also spend time in Australia.
One of his friends suggested he should consider going Down Under again and three weeks later, the father-of-three was back in Perth after securing a job from a contact he knew out there.
While faraway hills may look green, Pat (44) insists that it is not just as simple as flying to Australia and getting a job a short time after hopping off the plane.
“People emigrating to Australia now will find it harder to get accommodation, which is very expensive. Typically rents for a room in a house are €1,000 dollars a week. Education is very expensive. It can cost up to €20,000 a year to send a child to a private Catholic school.
“A three-bedroom house can cost up to €900,000 dollars. I know four lads from South-East Clare who had to live in a hostel because they found it too difficult to get accommodation. Claire O’Looney from Quin is over there working in real estate.
“One of the most important things to do before you go is to have a job lined up if possible and to make contact with as many people out there as possible. GAA clubs are also a good starting point to make contacts.
“The Irish name and reputation is not as good as it was 20 years ago. Some Irish people misbehaved by partying a bit too much in recent years,” he said.
It was difficult for Pat to leave his wife and three children and due to his huge involvement in community activities. In addition to spending a lot of time with Clooney/Quin GAA club as chairman and vice-chairman, he was a member of the local parish council and the board of management of Quin National School for eight years, was one of the founding members of the local golfing society and spent nine years as chairman of Quin Community Games.
Pat keeps in regular contact by phone and Skype, was home at Easter and plans another trip home during the summer thanks to an understanding boss.
Colette takes some consolation from the fact that he knows South West Australia very well and considers it a “home from home”.
Colette and Pat are in the lucky position of having dual citizenship and the benefit of having an Australian passport, which eliminates the need for visas is a huge advantage in 2012.
Pat is now working for a firm owned by Gerry Horgan from Macroom, which installs waste water treatment systems for two of the main mining companies Rio/Tinto and BHP. Most of his work is in the Pilbura region in North Western Australia. Components for the waste treatment plant are made in Perth and shipped on three massive articulated lorries or “road trains” as they are known locally.
A few days later, he flies up from Perth where he spends up to three weeks installing the treatment plant for the mine before it starts production.
Everything has to be brought to what effectively is a mobile town in the middle of the dessert where three is no vegetation and the nearest town in the Bush is about 100km away.
Rio Tinto mine iron ore most of which is exported to China.
Pat is following in the footsteps of Paddy Hannon from Quin, who discovered gold at Mount Charlotte in Kalgoorlie in 1893, starting the greatest gold rush in Western Australia’s history. Paddy migrated to Australia in 1863 to set up home in Melbourne.
Pat lives in Perth where he rents a house with Martin Hayes, from Doon who works in the oil rigs off of Karraha and the only difference between Christmas Day and other days is a longer lunch break.
That’s not the only mining link. Australian mining company Hy-Tech are at present exploring in the Quin parish.
He is now deeply involved with St Gabriel’s Hurling Club, which has numerous players from Galway and Clare including Sean Conheady, Clooney/Quin and Bernard Gaffney, Newmarket.
He is also doing some coaching with a local camogie club, which is focusing on targeting beginners’ skills and getting more women on board.
The huge influx of Irish people is reflected in the fact there are now eight Gaelic football teams in Perth, a second division was introduced for the first time and all teams have a reserve outfit.
This was also illustrated in the huge participation of teams for GAA games and camogie during the exhibition day in Thornley on St Patrick’s Day.
“I met a lot of people on St Patrick’s Day I knew from 20 years ago who never came home,” he said.
Pat hopes that the economy will improve in a few years, which will reduce the number of people who are forced to leave the country for work.
Clooney/Quin GAA chairman, Sean Earls believes new GAA president Liam O’Neill should sanction concerts in Croke Park and ring fence all the proceeds to fund job creation ventures for GAA members. This could be achieved by channeling all the money raised to County Enterprise Boards and groups like the Clare Local Development Company, who would in turn help GAA members to create employment to stay in the country.
Having lost about 15 players through emigration over a 12-month period, Sean insists that radical solutions are needed to prevent Clare GAA clubs from being hit even further over the coming years.