You never know what you might find in somebody’s handbag. In Bríd Graham’s case? A bag of rice.

“The phone fell into the pool,” she grimaces; though as the owner of Splash Swim School in Sligo, you’d guess it’s something of an occupational hazard.

With 600 students and six teachers it rarely stops ringing, with Bríd admitting that she even ended up fielding calls while in labour with her second child, William, two years ago.

“But sure, what else would you be at?” says Bríd, who is expecting her third baby this December, in her no-nonsense manner.

But then, as she shares her journey from city girl with a jet-setting career to entrepreneur, farmer, wife and mother with Irish Country Living, it’s clear that Bríd is not afraid of jumping in the deep end – in every sense.

City to country

Bríd attributes her work ethic to her parents, who both left their respective family farms to work in London in the 70s before returning to settle in Dublin, where they ran a drain clearing business.

“My dad was 24 hours, seven days a week – that was his tagline,” says Bríd, who recalls her first job in the office aged four, “taking staples out of envelopes.”

Still, it would take a few years until she would unleash her own inner entrepreneur. After studying languages at Trinity, Bríd trained as a primary school teacher in London, and was working in an inner city school near Camden when she came across a job advert that read “Tutor. Travel involved”.

“And then I ended up teaching for a Middle Eastern prince,” she says matter-of-factly of her two-year stint travelling the world by private jet as tutor to two children.

But apart from the glitz, Bríd explains that the experience would prove invaluable when it came to running her own swim school in the future.

“Literally, I was in charge of everything from child protection to test evaluation because they were going on to international boarding schools,” she explains, adding that it also gave her the “opportunity to see what can be achieved in small groups”. More of this later.

Bríd Graham is the owner of Splash Swim School in Sligo. \ Philip Doyle

By 2010, however, Bríd was ready for a change.

“I just felt: ‘I’ve done my stint in London’,” she explains. “I just wanted to come home to see what the next step was going to be. I always said I wanted to marry a farmer!”

And it seems that within hours of meeting Sligo man John Graham – well-known in farming circles through his work with Macra and the IFA – Bríd knew she had found ‘the one’.

“That night I went home and I phoned my best friend and told her she’d be my bridesmaid,” she laughs of their first meeting in a pub in Lucan in 2011. “We just found we had a lot in common.”

Despite having lived all of her life in a city, Bríd did not hesitate when it came to making the leap to rural life; from arriving at the chapel in Trinity College in a Claas tractor for their 2013 wedding to completing her Green Cert to start married life in John’s native Riverstown in Co Sligo, where they bought a house and small farm.

“I’d lived in central London in Knightsbridge with the family and all around north London and cycled past Westminster every day. I did that for six, seven years. Loved it, fantastic, great time, but you just evolve,” says Bríd.

Making a splash

When Bríd first came home to Dublin, she had completed a masters in management, but after moving to Sligo, found it impossible to get full-time work as a teacher, and fell into subbing. During a night out, however, a friend mentioned that a local swim school was looking for coaches and suggested Bríd apply, as she had previously completed a water safety teaching course.

“I said: ‘I couldn’t possibly’,” says Bríd of the initial doubt that seized her, but not only did she get a coaching job, within a year she was asked to take over the entire operation.

And so, it was into the deep end with Splash Swim School.

“It was endless nights of doing Excel, doing reports and getting stuff off to the printers and sending stuff to the newspapers; looking for ads and phoning people and answering people and looking for teachers and interviewing ... But that’s all part of running your own business,” says Bríd of the school, which has grown from 16 to 600 students and employs six teachers between its bases in Sligo’s Clayton Hotel and The Pier Head in Mullaghmore.

Bríd Graham is the owner of Splash Swim School in Sligo. \ Philip Doyle

Education

And with children already registered as far ahead as 2022, Bríd believes that the key to the school’s success is the personal attention given to each student. For instance, there is a maximum of four children in a beginner’s lesson, while there is one-to-one attention given to children with additional needs, with these classes run on a non-profit basis.

“Because we think we only get one chance in life to be a beginner at anything and when somebody hands you their four-year-old, it’s like precious cargo,” says Bríd, who believes that as well as water safety and swimming skills, the lessons that children learn in the pool are just as important as those at the school desk.

“We have concentration, we have confidence building, we have mathematical skills – ‘We’re going to kick for 10’,” she lists. “We have physics for bi-lateral breathing – you explain the circulation system – we have rewards, we have sanctions, we have attendance, we have certificates… and that’s what’s fantastic about it.”

As well as children, Bríd has recently launched one-on-one classes for adults who wish to learn how to swim; many of whom would have a deep fear of water due to a bad experience in the past.

“Someone pushed them under the water or they fell in or they had a really negative teacher or that they went underwater and no one noticed them. And it may only have been a split second, but you know what? That doesn’t matter,” says Bríd.

“And if you make the phone call [to book a lesson], that’s the first step to actually getting over it. Then the next step is turning up and coming into the changing room. And then after that it’s trying to get them to find their feet, where they’re going to hold onto the side and let their feet float up and then down, and up and down, until they know that if they’re not beside the wall that they can stand up again and we’re lucky that it’s a 1.4-metre pool, so there is no deep end, it’s only chest high.

“And then you spend one, maybe two, entire sessions on breathing, whether they’re going to breathe in through their nose, out through their mouth or whatever, so you try to take away the claustrophobia that a lot of people feel and just reassuring them constantly.

“I mean, I’m like: ‘You’re all my babies!’”

Bríd Graham is the owner of Splash Swim School in Sligo. \ Philip Doyle

A new identity

And speaking of which, as Splash Swim School has grown, so has Bríd and John’s family, with Judith, four and William, two, due to be joined by a third sibling at Christmas.

As well as using the local crèche two days a week, Bríd credits John and her mother-in-law for sharing the load when it comes to childcare.

However, after taking part in the ACORNS programme for rural female entrepreneurs, Bríd has pushed to grow the business – with the support for her loyal staff – so that she can step back and take maternity leave, and recently made the decision to invest in a manager, having found herself back at the pool four days after Judith’s arrival and taking calls during William’s labour.

“It was either I pay someone to come in and mind my kids, or I pay someone else to do my job, which they’re perfectly able to do, and I spend the time with my children,” says Bríd, though admits it is going to be very difficult to ‘stay away’ completely. Though in the process of switching from sucklers to a dairy herd on the home farm, the new arrival will also coincide with spring calving, with Bríd on stand-by. Very rarely does John have difficult calving, but if there is and if the rings have to come off, they have to come off,” she says simply. “It’s life and it’s death.”

Bríd Graham is the owner of Splash Swim School in Sligo. \ Philip Doyle

Looking back on how much her life has changed, Bríd admits that it’s almost ‘unrecognisable’.

And while she acknowledges the challenges in finding her feet in rural Ireland – joking that for a long time she was referred to locally as “John Graham’s woman”, then “John Graham’s wife” before she became known in her own right – she’s carved out her own place in the community.

“You have to give something a chance,” she advises anybody considering making the move from city to country life, adding that while you might feel like you are letting go of one identity that “another identity is going to form”.

And considering the splash she has made in just five years, it looks like Bríd is going to continue to go with the flow.

“I can’t imagine standing still,” she smiles.

For more information, visit splashswim.ie or follow on Facebook.Makeup by Carol Willis and hair by Phillipa’s Hair Design, Boyle.

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