A year on.

It is hard to believe that we have been living in Ireland for over a year now, and are settling in well on the whole. The kids are enjoying their school and it is good having cousins and family so near. There are some aspects that we hope will get substantially better in the year ahead, particularly our accommodation.

Perhaps it's a particular characteristic of people from these islands, but we are very keen to stop renting and own a house. It will be this that will help us feel truly settled. The kids are feeling it too as they miss the bigger rooms they had in their Stirlingshire home. The only question is when we're able to get a mortgage, what will we be able to afford.

House prices in Ireland are on the increase again as the economy continues to recover. Hopefully they'll not get as crazy as in the time of the Celtic Tiger. At that time housing estates seem to have been built with great speed. This meant that in some cases the quality of the build left a fair bit to be desired.

House prices aside the cost of living in Ireland is about twenty percent higher than Scotland. Naturally there is the obvious things like the necessity to have health insurance to take into account, but also simple things like food. Recently I heard that supermarkets here make a greater margin than they do elsewhere in europe. Which when everyone here is so good at pushing for deals; begs the question why? The effects of the recession are still being felt by everyone, with for example the higher cost of car insurance being blamed on the knock on effect of the collapse of Quinn Insurance.

 All that said I love the fact that the radio stations give a lot of air time to sports other than soccer. In fact sport is a great source of community spirit. Even in the smallest of villages there will be GAA club, playing either gaelic football or hurling. and these are run by people giving their time for the love of sport. When you get involved in sport, you are made to feel very welcome.

There are a lot of sports to choose from choose from in and around the town we live in, so the kids are doing a lot more activities than they did in Scotland. Some of which they do with their classmates after school. The education they get here is good and different in many ways from Scotland. In addition to the compulsory learning of Irish, they get a lot more homework than before. We also have to buy almost all their text books and jotters, or copies as they are called here. This means they should look after them better, but also makes a pleasant change from doing homework on work sheets.

It was a huge step moving here, even though it is only across the water. There are definitely, some surprising cultural differences between Ireland and Scotland. Whether there are as many differences as there are similarities, time will tell.