From Carpentry to Chemistry - Christopher McEleney's journey with education

When Christopher McEleney left school at Crana College in Buncrana in second year, at  just 14 years of age in 1995, he never intended to return to education. 

For him, like so many other young people in rural Donegal in the nineties, the future in the northwest was limited. So at 14, Chris, a native of Drumfries in Inishowen, became an apprentice to a carpenter and started his career on building sites across the northwest. 

What seemed like a fortune to a young teenager  - maybe £60 a week he now recalls - turned out to be just pocket money in the real world. Unable to make ends meet in Donegal, Chris joined the thousands of other Irish emigrants, and at just 19, he was bound for Boston. There, living in Dorchester, he worked on site in the heat, all inside jobs.

However, world events would shorten his stay in the US. When 9/11 occurred, the economic dynamics enjoyed by emigrants changed, and Chris took flight again, this time to the Isle of Man. He was determined to work hard and save for a house back in his home of Inishowen. For four years, he did just that.   

In 2005 the economy in Ireland seemed booming and a good opportunity for someone in his trade to move home, make money and be successful. On his return to Donegal, he became self-employed and was working every hour to meet the demand of the housing market at the time. He and his future wife, Joanne, from Clonmany, decided to put down roots again in Inishowen. Like many other returning emigrants, he built a house and started a family. They now have three children  - Kayla (16), Calum (14) and Antin (12).

Little did he know, their plans were all built on a house of cards and quickly the trade he had loved and relied on since he left school at 14 had collapsed. Worst still, as a self-employed worker at that time, he had no entitlement to social security.  In a desperate situation, Chris realised he needed to get a qualification if he was to improve his and his family's situation.  

He started looking at how to get a qualification and decided to do his Leaving Certificate through Donegal ETB's Further Education and Training (FET) Service in 2010 at the age of 29, sitting his exams alongside the uniformed students at Errigal College in Letterkenny. Back then, he freely admits now, there was no major plan, content to take it “one step at a time.”

Chris was immediately infected with a love for education but was also conscious of the financial burden and judgement from others as he went back to school:

“Once I started back in school, I was hooked,” Chris says. “It wasn’t like I hated school as a child, in the society of that time, I had just believed that I needed to be out earning with a trade. And, despite all the moral support from family and friends when I returned to education, I was particularly sensitive to the criticism and recurring question of ‘where will you work then?’ and often felt embarrassed and as a result, would hide my bag if I spotted someone I knew in the early days.”

Despite the uncertainties, Chris knew if he stuck at the books, the benefits would outweigh the negatives in the long run.

“I knew if I wanted to improve my situation for the long-term I needed to persevere and keep going.,” he said. “When I got my Leaving Cert results, I wanted to keep going. I had fallen in love with science and started looking at courses in Letterkenny.”

In 2016 he graduated with an Honours Degree in Science and continued his studies through a research Masters in Electrochemistry which he successfully achieved in 2018.  

What now seemed to some as an obsession in education, Chris was determined to achieve his PhD. For the next four years, supported by ATU, Teagasc and Dr Denis Mc Crudden, he worked on research into portable analytical methodologies using nanoparticle technology, primarily focused in soil. 

His deep rooted love in education, in exploring the unknown and pushing himself to the limits has led him from a 14-year-old boy who left school to a 41-year-old celebrating the conferring of his PhD from Atlantic Technological University. These days, he lectures in Chemistry and Maths at ATU Donegal in Letterkenny. 

The educational journey we take is never the same. For some the road is straight and clear, for others it is a long journey of discovery, struggles, triumph and hopefully, like Dr Chris McEleney, success.