Home is where the heart is as Anne looks to fulfil her 55 year old Galway dream at last!

Anne Stanley has a recurring dream for the last 55 years – she wants to live in Galway and she has turned to the internet to make that happen. 

House-hunting via the web is not uncommon; so when it came to finding her dream home, 55-year-old Anne felt that online forums would be of more help than the usual property websites. But it was the tone of her plea that marked this out as more than just a home search.

“Time has come for the house here in Greystones, Co. Wicklow to be sold, divided and finally to head to where I’ve spent the last 55 years wanting to be… Galway,” read her post on Boards.ie.

But what is it about Galway that is so attractive to her?

“Galway is soft; Galway is wild, its shadows playing chasing across the mountains; its rowdy drunks in Eyre Square; its vivid squalls out at sea; its beer cans littering an unspoilt beach. It’s not perfect by any means. I don’t wear rose-tinted glasses, but it’s Galway,” she said, so poetically that she makes even the least attractive parts of Galway sound magical.

“I first came to Galway as a child, very young for my years. I was eleven, an only child and born to parents who were 40 and 55 respectively. I led a fairly isolated childhood, having never actually met another child until my first day at school, which was interesting to say the least,” Anne recalled.

“But I had never been away from home on my own before, so being deposited abruptly off a smoky CIE bus on a grey afternoon and left on a barren roadside with a black hill to my right and stark grey walls and a cruel-looking sea to my left should have been the ultimate nightmare. I should have stood there and screamed for the posh roads of Foxrock, but I didn’t.”

In fact, Anne felt perfectly at home, inhaling the turf smoke, watching the hens pecking around the gate of a cottage opposite. This experience had a lasting effect on her and has caused her grief and happiness in equal amounts over the years.

“Grief for the thirty plus years that I was away; I would turn on TG4 and literally sob as I watched the currachs on the feast of St Mac Dhara, or even listening to the news as Gaeilge would sometimes turn the tap,” she said.

Now Anne and her partner Terry are hoping to fulfil her lifelong dream of moving to Galway along with their three dogs, Jess, Kelsie and Molly and their little orange cat, Charlie. But what would their dream house be?

“We’ve decided that Oughterard is the place that we really want to be. In practical terms, we need three bedroom and we need land; land enough for our wooffies and myself to get our daily exercise; land enough to pick a few apples perhaps, grow a few vegetables maybe. The house itself just has to be dry and warm with an open fire or wood burner,” said Anne.

See full story in this week’s Connacht Tribune.