Lecturer's Dundalk redbrick for €410,000. The seller: Vona Groarke.
What and where: Four-bedroom detached house at 67 Belfry Drive, Dundalk
Describe the house: It's detached, overlooking a green area in a quiet and well-maintained development within an easy walk of the town and new shopping centre, The Marshes. It has four double bedrooms, one en suite, a study, sittingroom, kitchen/diningroom with handmade units, utility room, wooden floors, Italian tiles, double hotpress, bathroom, downstairs toilet, decent-sized garden with a patio to the rear.
Why are you moving?: I got a new job in the University of Manchster
What's the best thing about it?: I love my house: if I could pick it up and take it with me to Manchester, (where I've just started a new job), I would. I'll really miss its brightness and quietness and how it feels modern, but is cosy too.
We're one mile from the M1 and 52 miles from O'Connell Bridge.
The train from Dundalk to Dublin takes 48 minutes and you can drive to Dublin airport (and Belfast airport, for that matter) in even less than that.
And the neighbourhood?: Dundalk has come on a lot in recent years. It's almost unrecognisable from the town I moved to 10 years ago. We're a 10-minute walk from one of John McKenna's favourite restaurants, Number 32, and about the same from one of the coolest pubs and music venues in the country, the Spirit Store.
I don't think Dundalk gets fair press in the national media: it has shaken off the bad old days and emerged as a pretty cool modern shopping town right beside Cooley scenery that would give Connemara a run for its money.
We got our boiler serviced in June by a young Dub. Like Brendan Behan, he clearly believed, "They eat their young beyond the Red Cow Inn" and had just bought his first house - a three-bed semi-detached in Swords for €580,000.
"That's a lot of money," I said.
"It is," he grimaced, "but where are you going to go?"
For €170,000 less, and for a bigger house, Dundalk?
Who'd like your house? : A first-time buyer, maybe, squeezed out by Dublin prices, for whom €410,000 will be a sweet deal.
To view: the house is for sale through Sherry FitzGerald Carroll.view it on www.myhome.ie
