Unique insight to deepening demographic shifts in east Mayo town
Make-up of Ballyhaunis Tennis Club reveals so much about the community's wide diversity
by Mark Godfrey
Ballyhaunis Table Tennis Club has return to action after the prolonged lockdown.
It was too long for Dominik Vidovic who plays at the club opposite his compatriot Vojtech Sulpok on one of the club’s professional sized tables. Covid was a tough time for the hulking Slovak.
“There was nothing to do during Covid, this is my social life, it was really hard,” he said.
Vidovic has lived in Ballyhaunis for 13 years, Sulpok for three. Both came to work at Dawn Meats.
The eagerness of both players was palpable as they played under the hanging globe-style lights and a fading Autumn sunlight filtered through the stained glass windows of St. Mary’s Abbey where the club is based until its usual locale, the parochial hall, is being refurbished.
The subdued lighting of the church is not ideal for table tennis but “better than nothing”, Vidovic explains, “because it was so hard” when the club closed for nearly a year during the Covid pandemic. “We were playing three days a week and then nothing, no game, nothing to do,” he said.
The make-up of the club is illustrative of deepening demographic shifts in the east Mayo town where employers are going further east to find workers for industrial jobs as the wave of Poles who came here in the early 2000s has subsided.
The Covid officer at Ballyhaunis Table Tennis Club is Bart Ilczuk, a father of one who works in Dawn Meats and one of a now dwindling population of Poles, the others drawn home by rising wages and an economic boom helped by a EUR 9 billion transfer in EU cohesion funds and a deluge of investment from western European manufacturers.
Ilczuk left his hometown of Olsztyn, a handsome city on the Lyna River in northern Poland, for Ireland in 2005.
In 2008 he found himself on the slaughter line at Dawn Meats. He’s been there 12 years and bought a house in Hazelhill, on the southwest perimeter of town.
“I was playing table tennis since I was seven in Poland, I got to the third division in the national league. Table tennis is very popular in Poland, we have a very good academy in Gdansk. In Ireland it’s not such a big deal but the Gaelic sport is very big here.”
Ilczuk is here to stay - “I’m nearly Irish now, I am here to stay,” he said.
But he’s seen others stay away. Poland’s economy is strong, wages are rising fast.
Polish wage growth averaged 5.6 percent in the period 2017-2019 compared to an EU average of 0.4 according to accounting firm Grant Thornton.
“There’s a lot of Polish people going to Germany, or Sweden or Holland, not so much to Ireland.”
Ilczuk is reticent but a much more verbal compatriot in Ballyhaunis, Jakub Grabiasz, tells the Polish migrant story with eloquence.
“In 2004 I came with four colleagues to work on the buildings, we worked for a local developer. At that time there were hundreds of thousands of Poles moving here.
"I remember in the 2005 or 2006 census it said more than 400,000 Polish people in Ireland. In those first few years of EU membership Ireland, the UK and Scandinavia were the only countries to open the job market to us.”
A monthly wage was equivalent to a weekly wage in Ireland when Grabiasz arrived.
“At that time Poland was completely different from what we now know. We were just coming out of the post-Soviet economy. We had freedom of speech but still [had] bad wages.”
Much has changed. After first being enamoured by all the cash its emigrants were sending home “the [Polish] government quickly realised this is not good. Because it was mostly people with skills who left, entrepreneurs, hardworking people.”
A flood of investment into Poland means wage gaps have narrowed by half: two weeks in Ireland equates to one month’s salary here, according to Grabiasz. He calculates out of the 400,000 here in 2006 there are now 100,000 in Ireland. The turning point was 2008 when the Celtic Tiger started to collapse.
“The recession cut a lot of jobs and people went back to Poland. A lot of construction workers had come to Ireland to build the Celtic Tiger Dream.
"I remember our company, there was eight Polish on the team and no Irish… A lot of the guys were going home two or three times a year and didn’t want to stay here and be on the welfare. They were people of work and proud of being Polish.”
As Poles go home, local employers are going further east in search of workers. A new member of Ballyhaunis Table Tennis Club Sasha Pyatov is Ukrainian and came this summer to Ballyhaunis having been recruited by Dawn Meats.
Sasha is settling into his first autumn outside Ukraine. Table tennis has given continuity and allowed him to return to a sport he played well in Kiev two decades ago.
The influx is often transitory however. Workers like Sasha -whose colleagues at Dawn include a growing Brazilian population - are on short-term contracts linked to temporary visas for those without EU passports.
That transitory nature makes it difficult to cultivate talent according to the club’s coach, an enthusiastic retiree named Shay O’Reilly whose story of searching for a house to buy confirms that Ballyhaunis, like many other towns in the west of Ireland, has enjoyed a surge in population which belies frequently repeated complaint about rural decline rehashed by some populist political parties.
A native of Phibsboro in the north inner city, O’Reilly moved to Ballyhaunis two year ago, after buying a farmhouse on the Cloonfad side of town. Ballyhaunis has a shortage of housing due to the influx of foreign workers and asylum seekers housed in a direct provision centre centred on the former campus of a girl’s secondary school run by the Mercy order of nuns.
Because of its universal appeal the sport offers a microcosm of the demographic changes in the town. Irish teenagers are coached by head coach O’Reilly.
“We first started the club to give teenager something to do, and to train them up, we had a lot of kids from the asylum centre too.”
Ballyhaunis Table Tennis club will run a training programme for women this autumn, sponsored by Mayo Sports Partnership which is keen to get women more active.
The programme is “attracting great interest,” said O’Reilly.
Members of the Pakistani and Syrian community come in groups. But the keenest players are Slavs, explains O’Reilly who played competitive table tennis over several decades in halls across Dublin. However Slavs may be in shorter supply locally – the largest Slavic grouping by numbers, Poles aren’t coming to Ireland any more, according to Grabiasz.
“I see no new Polish faces here in the past five years. Whoever is going to Poland is going back.
“During Covid I never saw so many going back.There’s plenty of work in Poland –and in nearer neighbouring countries. Ireland is a far away country for us,” explains Grabiasz.
“You have to fly here. Or you can drive 380 kilometres to Vienna. All my wife’s cousins are working there. They drive four hours every Sunday night but spend the weekend at home.
"It makes no sense to fly three hours to Ireland.”
Germany, which didn’t originally admit Polish migrants in 2004, is now short of labour and has become the favoured destination for Polish workers. Companies organise accommodation. But many Poles want to stay home.
“There’s a different mentality now. I see young people with the equivalent of their Leaving Cert and they are not looking to emigrate,” says Grabiasz.
If Polish immigrants see opportunities at home it’s a similar situation for migrants from Hungary, the other large eastern European state in the 2002 enlargement of the EU. Ballyhaunis-based Ildiko Ignacz from the Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok county in central Hungary says Hungarians are still coming to Ireland - she’s part of a Facebook group for new arrivals.
“But you have a better chance now to build a better life in Hungary.”
The average wage in Hungary are twice as high today than in 2006 when Ignacz moved to Galway at the age of 21.
“I was studying conservation engineering, my partner was studying wood products engineering. A trained roofer, he’s currently working as a garden machinery mechanic while Ildiko runs her own baking business from their home in Annagh, a few kilometres north of Ballyhaunis town centre. Hungary is also keen to hold onto its young.
“Hence it’s easier for young couples to buy a house in Hungary thanks to a government backed mortgage scheme, explains Ignacz.
“Buyers can get €30,000 to help you buy if you’ve got three kids and then you can get a low interest mortgage.”
Such supports almost drew her and her young family back to Hungary a few years ago when they were wanted to buy their own home.
But her family settled in Ballyhaunis three years ago when the estate agent in Galway said “once you over the border the price dropped in half.” After looking in Cloonfad and Claremorris they settled on a hundred year old farmhouse in Annagh that had been empty for over ten years. “We had four good walls. We did the work ourselves and added an extension.”
Higher living expenses in Mayo are driving others back to Eastern Europe from the west of Ireland, believes Jakub Grabiasz.
“Housing is mega expensive in Ireland…you spend half your wages to live… Nobody in Ireland got a dramatic pay rise but look how much we pay for petrol or milk and vegetables compared to five years ago.”
Life may be expensive but there are social benefits to living in Ireland. While healthcare is free in Hungary the minimum wage in Ireland “means you have security no matter where you work,” explains Ildiko Ignacz. Wages in medical or IT jobs in Hungary are comparable to similar roles in Ireland but lower wage retail jobs are paid as little as EUR700 per month.
Ignacz says she knows a few Hungarian families in Ballyhaunis.
“They’re working in Bpod [bathroom fixtures factory] and Dawn Meats and Western Brand.”
"The EU freedom to move and work has given a younger generation of Hungarians a curiosity for travel.
“Nearly everyone has a family member who has moved somewhere in the EU.”