When I left Mayo to go to University at the age of 16 to study Engineering I never thought I would be returning 24 years later to open a café right beside where I grew up! Not that I thought I wouldn’t return to live in Mayo, I just never thought it would take me 24 years to get back! Coming back to Mayo to set up my own café business has been a dream come true on so many levels, not least because I had also met Derek who I married in 2018 and baby Peter arrived in 2019.  

But let’s go back to life before Riverside! While I was studying in UCD, my main ambition was to complete my degree and return to Mayo. However when I was offered a job as a graduate engineer in Xilinx in my final year in college, I decided I would give it one more year in Dublin, surely the experience would be good! In the blink of an eye one year had magically transformed into 20 years! Xilinx was the vehicle that allowed me to travel across the globe and for that I am eternally grateful! Among the wonderful destinations was San Jose in Silicon Valley, Tokyo, Taipei, Hong Kong, Singapore, Catania, Eggelsberg, Belgrade, Corsica, Kortrijk, Saffron Waldron, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Vienna, Barcelona, Rome, Munich, Stockholm, Zagreb, Tel Aviv, Boston, Detroit, Thief River Falls, and back to Dublin again. With Xilinx I got the opportunity to work with very cool technology and the most wonderful people. It was a tough decision to say goodbye to my Xilinx family but it was time to return to my native shore and be close to family again, where a whole new chapter of my life was to begin… to be contd.