Category: Ireland

Childcare

***Warning, this post contains unchecked moaning about the cost of living in Ireland, if you don’t want to hear yet another person going on about this tired old subject please stop reading now!***

I have been very lucky so far with my childcare. My sister has been looking after Eve since I started working again this summer and it’s been the perfect set-up. She’s a qualified nanny with many years experience and she needed something to fill the gap while she got herself sorted with her own creche. So it was great for both of us.

Now she’s finally starting up her own place, it’s going to be excellent and I know she’s going to do really well and I’m delighted for her. Unfortunately it means I have to face up to the reality that is Childcare in Ireland since my sister lives all the way down in Wicklow and it’s too far to try and get Eve to her every day.

So my options are:

1. Put Eve into a crÃ©che
2. Hire a nanny from a local ad (probably not qualified)
3. Hire a nanny through an agency
4. Get an au pair
5. Matt gives up his job and becomes Mr. Mom

Number 1 is a road I just didn’t want to go down; we moved back to Ireland so that I could be at home with Eve, even if I’m working in another room I can still stop what I’m doing and feed her or play with her or just give her a cuddle. Plus it’s hard to find a crÃ©che without a long waiting list and a crippling fee (over â‚¬1000 a month isn’t unusual around here).

Number 2 is not ideal because it’s scary enough hiring a stranger to mind your child without taking a chance on someone with no qualifications who you’ve found via a flyer in a shop window.

Number 3 was the route we were looking at up until I checked the fine print. Agency fees are 10% the gross salary you’ll be paying the nanny plus 21% VAT! So, if you’re planning on paying a nanny â‚¬10 an hour (which isn’t as much as a lot of nannies will be looking for…most charge â‚¬12 an hour), that adds up to a gross salary of â‚¬12,000 per annum for a part-time job, which means the agency is looking for the guts of â‚¬1,500 for just introducing you to a nanny! So in the first month we’d have to pay a total of â‚¬2,500. We just can’t afford that. I shudder to think of what it would be like for someone looking for a full-time nanny. The first month would cost roughly something like â‚¬4,300!

Number 4 would be great and would be the option I’d jump at if only we had a bigger house. Yet another worn-out topic of conversation here in Ireland: the price of buying or renting a house. We’re paying over â‚¬1000 a month for a small 3 bedroom house (except a bed wouldn’t fit in the 3rd one) and a larger house in the same area would be at least â‚¬5oo more.

Number 5 is starting to look very appealing and unless I start getting more imaginative with my methods of finding someone Matt will be staying at home. Of course, with just one salary coming in our chances of ever being able to buy our own place are seriously in doubt.

Cue the violins.

childcare

Computer Games Ireland

GAA Players On The PS2

There was a report in yesterday’s Tribune that caught my eye. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be on their website so I can’t link to it but it was a piece on the ongoing row between the GAA and the GBA about the image rights of the players, this time in relation to a new Playstation game by Sony. Now, I realise that there’s a whole lot more going on behind this, it’s just one more chapter in a big beef between these two groups but it just struck me as ridiculous.

According to the Tribune’s report the Gaelic Football players are up in arms because the game allows gamers to name the players on their make-believe teams whatever they want. So essentially they can play the All-Ireland final all over again with players of their choice or with players from whatever era or with whoever they want. The players are angry because they feel their image rights are not being protected in this. Hmm. Oookay. But fellas, your images aren’t being used. Your names may be but as I understand it this is just in the same way that any game provides the gamer with the ability to name the characters. So your name could be used but then again so could the entire cast of Coronation Streets’. There could be a Corrie v Crossroads playoff on some gamer’s console. Hey for all I know somebody could be using my name to play Halo with!! I feel so used!

Or maybe that’s it. I just have to wonder are they peeved because they’ve heard the stories about Tiger Woods or Ronaldo or Tony Hawks being paid big bucks to have their images used in the games that bear their names. If that’s the case then they’ve got their heads in the clouds. Ronaldo was involved in all aspects of his game from the cover to the promotion. An image of his face was used to texture the head of the ingame model. As for Tiger Woods, he was mo-capped (wore a ping-pong covered body suit that digitally tracked his movements) so that not only was his image used ingame, but so were his signature moves.

Perhaps this is what they’re getting at, maybe the players are hoping for some sweet deal that involves them in all the merchandising of this game and gives them a nice wad of cash. Well, I think they’re barking up the wrong tree by blaming the GAA for not securing this for them. Face it, a gaelic football game is never going to have the same global appeal as a Golf or Soccer game, no matter if it’s got Ryan McMenamin on the cover. I can’t even find a mention of it on amazon.co.uk. I would say that it was Sony who wasn’t interested in going to the hassle of putting the players’ faces on the ingame characters and they wouldn’t have been interested in shelling out big bucks to secure image rights when they can just go the easy route and leave it open to the gamer. It just wouldn’t make any difference to the bottom line. Those die-hard fans would still buy it and those who don’t know about Gaelic football won’t know who these guys are or care about the game.

Plus, with the developers being Australian I’d say they just tweaked their Aussie Rules game and regurgitated it to make it GAA.

Illustration Ireland Photography

Bluebells

Bluebells, originally uploaded by gingerpixel.

I can’t believe the summer is over 🙁

Just uploaded a few of my favourite summer photos to Flickr to console myself.

Ireland

So Bloody Noisy

I live in an area of South Dublin called Ballybrack and it’s got to be one of the noisiest places I’ve ever lived in (the noisiest is probably the centre of Dublin in an apartment above a taxi rank).

Our bedroom is on the side of the house nearest to the road and every night there are dogs barking, car alarms and house alarms going off, drunken arguments and, the worst of all, the boy racers and moped riders. I mean come on, is there anything sadder? If you have the kind of money it takes to soup up your Fiat Uno with ridiculous exhausts and spoilers than why not buy a proper car?? And as for mopeds, do you really think you look cool on something that sounds like a clapped-out hairdryer?

There is a guy who rides his moped around the housing estate across from us every single night; up, down and around the cul de sacs as if he’s cruising the streets of Rome. Oh for a long stick to jam into those spokes. I’m usually a pretty laid back person but at 1am when I’m grabbing the precious couple of hours I get to sleep between feedings I can get ugly when it’s ruined on me.

A couple of weekends ago we were treated to a 2am domestic between some neighbours. Picture my husband and I perched like prairie dogs peeking out the window. It was all “You f**kin’ slept wi’ me last night and now you’re on the couch with hoo-er!”

At least yell a bit more backstory so we can really follow along!