One In A Million

Inspired by her childhood holiday home, Katie and Dave embarked on finding one of their own. Luckily, a converted mill just outside Kinsale became available and it was love at first sight!

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Katie lives in Cheshire, but her mother is a Cork woman, who went to University College Cork before traveling to England, where she met and married an Englishman and had six children. Looking after that lot must have been some job, especially in the school holidays, so she wisely decided to import the lot to Kinsale for the summers, where Katie and her siblings would have no end of things to do.

‘I loved it’, says Katie. ‘We had a holiday home in The Dock in Kinsale, the first holiday village in Ireland. Most families there were from Cork city and spent the summers in Kinsale. Everybody knew everybody and I made a lot of lasting friendships there.’ Katie grew up, qualified as a lawyer and married businessman and developer David McGoff, whose own mother’s family hailed from Mayo.

‘Dave always loved coming to Ireland, and even though his roots are elsewhere, he loved coming to Kinsale, where our family had so many connections.’ It wasn’t just Katie and her family who returned to Cork every year, her other five siblings loved it there too. ‘The family still had the house in The Dock, but sometimes everyone wanted it at once!’ says Katie. She and David rented holiday homes when they were out of luck with the family home, but even that became more difficult when they had more children; five to be exact. ‘It was hard enough to find suitable rentals where the owners were happy to have children and five proved too many for most available houses to accommodate,’ she says.