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ARE you constantly stressed out from long commutes, traffic jams, crowded public transport, road tolls, expensive bars and restaurants, extortionate rents and house prices, lads with ronnies bumming smokes, that God awful accent, the stink from the Liffey, locals gloating about winning the All Ireland Football, Pat Kenny’s face, the Spire, suicidal cyclists and the fear of being beaten to a pulp on O’Connell Street? But don’t know what to do about it?

Let us tell you about a mysterious place in Ireland called ‘not Dublin’, a magical land where rents and childcare are affordable, house prices are reasonable, and where people can commute to work in less than 30 minutes. This enchanted place also offers excellent jobs in IT, sciences, design, Agri food, engineering and manufacturing.

Choosing the South East as our case study, WWN travelled all the way to Waterford from its headquarters in Waterford to see if the claims were true, despite our newspaper being located here for the past 250 years.

Arriving some ten minutes after setting off, we were astounded to find people with upside down Dublin facial expressions called ‘smiles’, casually walking around the city centre like they were happy, or dare we say content in their own being and without worry.

“I cycled into work on the Greenway straight into the city centre and didn’t get fucked out of it once by a prick motorist,” explained one local worker we spoke to, “in fact, there are no cars on the Greenway at all, which is probably safer now I think about it. I couldn’t imagine going shoulder to shoulder with a double decker”.

Venturing further, we made the long and tedious journey to Kilkenny, which took us a staggering 32 minutes and 17 seconds to get to from Waterford, where we spoke to more happy lunatics who seemed to be also happy living there.

“Might go for a nice walk around the castle for lunch,” said one woman we spoke to who works as an animator in a local Oscarnominated cartoon studio, “can’t wait to get back to my 3 bed, 800 euro a month house and just relax after leaving work five minutes before – it’s a tough old life down here all the same”.

Imagine our horror at also discovering that people are leading contented lives with good careers in places like Wexford, Carlow, and – God Help Us – Tipperary, which, according to our research, is not a long way at all.

Sick to our very core, we later found out that the large majority of people whoactually movedto work in the South East were either satisfied or very satisfied with their move, something which led us to our final conclusion; simply remove the stress out of Dublin by not living in Dublin.