Irish people have always been emigrants, which is why it doesn’t seem unusual to hear us discuss an urge to travel or to try out life elsewhere. It’s why, if we feel homesick, we can generally find an Irish community regardless of where we end up, especially if we go to the usual places – the UK, Australia, the United States or Canada. Because the emigration conversation is so deeply knitted into our history, we can sometimes forget to consider the way that conversation changes over time, or to presume that patterns repeat without looking into what makes “this time” different from “last time”. It is easy to dismiss emigration as entirely normal as a result. It is normal, and yet the collective conversation has once again changed since the pandemic.
According to the Central Statistics Office, more than 64,000 people left the State in the 12 months to April 2023, compared to just over 56,000 people the previous year. The 2023 figure is the highest in some time, while almost 30,000 of the 141,600 immigrants were returning Irish citizens. So while we are leaving, and have always left, some of us are coming back home, as we always have. However, something about the current public conversation does feel different. We have reached a point when people (generally under the age of 40, which is not “young” by any stretch and never has been) saying “I cannot afford to live in Ireland” evokes surprise from no one. It is a widely understood feature of our country.
[Old buildings are key to our landscape our self image and our national story]
Among their other stereotypical efficiencies, the Germans appear to have a word for everything. “Fernweh” is the one best applied to so many Irish people at the moment – “far sickness”. The idea of longing for elsewhere, in this case not necessarily because of the merits of anywhere else in particular but because of the discomfort of being at home. The dissonance of it. The awareness for millennials and Gen Z of having met all the criteria for an independent life that our parents set out before us – working hard, getting the degree and perhaps a postgraduate qualification on top of it, securing a decent job – and realising that while we have been following the rules, they changed.
My friend wants to stay in Ireland but I have my doubts about whether they will be able to. The life now awaiting them is not one anyone can live without significant distress and harm
The route our parents took to security, which was promised to us if we did what they advised, has not led where we’d all hoped. A rental home is either not affordable or available in the midst of the worst housing crisis in the history of the state. A mortgage is not securable for countless people and is especially unattainable for single people. Invariably when this is brought up, someone will cite interest rate struggles in the 1980s but tend to omit the differences between then and now. The huge disparity between the average mortgage and annual take-home pay. The terms that will see millennials and Gen Z paying off mortgages well into their 70s if they can secure one at all, and if they can find an available property within their budget.
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There is a general lack of compassion between generations in Ireland. A disappointment from Gen X and Baby Boomers that we are not securing the attainments they associate with success either at all or until comparatively late in life. Homes, marriages and families. There is a lack of awareness that when employed 40-year-olds have no option but to live in their parents’ house en masse, or live in shared rental houses for 20 years straight, the failure is not personal but systemic. Let us save some compassion too for those Gen X and Boomer parents, who deserve a peaceful, private home after working all their lives to pay off their own mortgages, and don’t need their greying adult children coming in drunk on a Saturday night. In an ideal world, there is a natural point at which people should stop feeling directly responsible for their children.
A single friend of mine in Dublin has been trying to find rental accommodation for some time. Over a period of months, they have been sending me increasingly grim and desperate messages about their search. Last week, they shared a Daft.ie listing for an “apartment” in Dublin that was a shipping container. Not a modular building or a mobile home or a converted prefab, but a windowless shipping container with a bed in it. This person’s job is in Dublin and they cannot easily just leave their support network and family. Nor do they want to. Soon, my friend will be homeless. They have friends’ couches to sleep on but will get up every morning to go to work and will have nowhere of their own to return to at the end of the day. No privacy. No quiet. They will be living out of a suitcase at the goodwill of others. Eventually, and understandably, people run out of goodwill for the person sleeping on their couch.
Homelessness is not just sleeping on the street. As of March 2024, almost 14,000 people in Ireland were accessing emergency accommodation. That included more than 4,000 children as of last January and of course, those numbers exclude the many people without access to emergency accommodation, who do have to sleep on our streets. My friend wants to stay in Ireland but I have my doubts about whether they will be able to. The life awaiting them now is not one anyone can live without significant distress and harm.
When emigrants speak critically of home, we are often met with a defensive tone. There is an “all right now, enough so” attitude to the public conversation on Irish people and their far-sickness. This critique usually comes from people who find my generation’s struggle with our home country a bit tedious. People who have relative security and don’t feel that their country demands much more than it offers. Yet younger (but not necessarily young) Irish people are vocal about what they need to stay at home, and many of them do dearly want to stay. Housing. Healthcare. The ability to live and care for a family on the salary they earn. Far sickness is rarely about where you are going. It’s about where you are now.
