Anyone thinking of emigrating?

Yeah I was disappointed to find that despite my company having a presence in the states it seems the only long-term visa for internal company transfers applies to executive and upper management roles which isn't the path I'm on. There's a semi-loophole where if you do get sponsored to get in then you can work for a different company once they'll do the paperwork. Seems like a lot of companies will hire people already there on such a visa but have much less interest in doing the legwork.

Me too. Good Government, functioning society, variety here. Why would I inflict Ireland upon myself. There is still a pull but every logical bone in my body says don't do it.

If I already owned a house then I'd be more likely to hang about. The security would be nice.

I dunno man, the last 2 years have just been so constantly bloody miserable here. Last year while we were doing **** all I sat and watched 135k people in Indianapolis cheer some guys vroom vrooming around. Switch around and see crowds at F1 across Europe. The fact that so much of our "culture" revolves around drinking (and I don't drink anyway) was obvious before but after the last 2 years it's even clearer. I look at Europe and America and see cities nicer and cheaper than Dublin with so much more to do. Hilarious seeing bands selling tickets in Dublin for twice the price of elsewhere. Any time I look into hobbies there's roadblocks to them in Ireland. Want a nice car? Better make a **** ridiculous amount of money. Want a powerful car? Good luck. Want a motorbike? **** you you can't be trusted and have to dick about for 2 years. The low population also just means that a lot of stuff that are hobbies even in the UK never reached critical mass over here.

If you have family members living in the US they can fulfil the sponsor route as well, providing they are willing.

All the time, have done on and off for 25 years now (though I'm in NI not Ireland). Places we have thought of going over the years include Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, France and Ireland. Usually places with a good IT sector for work plus my French isnt bad. Thats seriously thinking, as in getting forms / deposits / etc, not just idle dreaming. Problem is its a big step when it comes to the practicalities, living away from parents and friends. Also everywhere has its good and bad points, nowheres perfect.

Once kids appear theres loads of reasons not to go - they dont want to leave friends because friends are their whole world when young, or you dont want to mess with their exams when a bit older, or you're forcing your change on them when they're difficult teens or you're faced to living in another country from them if they decide not to go. Nightmare. If you're going to go the time is pre kids, certainly before they're in school. Maybe even pre marriage because getting two people as committed to the idea is rare enough.

At this stage I'd settle for a 1 bedroom apartment in Southern France or Spain for future retirement lol.

The current UK government is the most untruthful, corrupt and self-serving bunch that I have ever seen in Western Europe. As you say, government is a reflection of the people.

Maybe "they" (I don't know anyone who had a helicopter for their communion) had the super high expectations of not graduating into an economy with 15% unemployment. Crazy bastards. :P

I’ve lived in plenty of parts of Europe on and off and some of the comments here are a tad “grass is always geeener” or seem to imagine the pandemic isn’t happening anywhere else.

Spain has a lot going for it - but you’ll rapidly find the salaries are too low, the tax isn’t low, accommodation (relative to income) is expensive and it’s extremely bureaucratic - try going self employed! It’s like the tax authorities immediately assume you’re trying to defraud them. A friend of mine trying to get a small business off the ground had to hire a full time administrator (in a business with 4 employees) and was audited 3 times in one year without any justification.

France - tax, tax, tax and more tax on the tax and painful bureaucracy. The weather’s fine in summer. However, for most of the country the place turns to a west of Ireland like Atlantic mush in the winter, only without the colour and vibrancy. A lot of rural areas are so dead you’d wonder if they were abandoned and the cost of living is high and rental etc is soaring in large, attractive regional cities like Bordeaux, Nantes, Lyon etc. Paris was always nuts. There are beautiful places but, they’re expensive. Also rural France in my experience is a lot more conservative than 2020s rural Ireland.

Belgium - bureaucratic nightmare at times and nanny state. The police came around to check your name is correctly spelled on the door bell. You can’t put your washing machine on after certain times. If you’re self employed, eg working freelance, you have to collect VAT numbers for every bill paid to you (no matter how small) and produce all of them on OCR forms to their Revenue. Very high tax. Accommodation is a bit cheaper, but cost of living is high. Mobile phone service as very expensive compared to Ireland (or practically anywhere else.)

As for the USA, it’s fine as long as you never ever engage with politics or turn on the news. Seems to be one endless culture war and some of the southern states are nuts. Would you really want your daughters growing up in Texas wheee they could get pregnant and possibly sued / criminally charged for seeking an abortion? Or have to deal with receding LGBT rights driven by religious fundamentalists? We got away from that stuff in Ireland but they seem to be going backwards in certain US states.

Ireland’s main problem is housing costs are getting totally out of hand, particularly in Dublin due to lack of supply, rapidly growing population and probably a hang over from 2008. If you’re not in Dublin particularly the rental market, it’s not that bad.

Pressure from speculators is a thing in a lot of places at the moment too. Dublin (and Cork to some extent) are feeling that. You’re seeing it in French cities, in Canada (far more than here), in popular parts of the USA, New Zealand and Australian prices are also absolutely soaring. That’s being driven by a broken global financial system and money flowing into bricks and mortar because returns on other steady investments, bonds and interest rates are so low it’s ridiculous. So that money has flowed into real estate.

My sense is we’re due a fairly large global financial bang from COVID. There’s an unreality at the moment and something is going to give eventually.

Regarding Irish health. If you analyse the figures, around 33% of our health spending is probably social spending that we classify as health because of historical responsibility of health boards for many of those areas.

We don’t pay anything like the amount of social charges levied on the continent, and VHI etc is relatively cheap. My view of it is Ireland lives in cloud cuckoo land on health. We aren’t willing to pay for a proper system, but we aren’t willing to analyse or discuss the true costs, or the possibility of very serious reform like moving to a continental style universal insurance model, so the circus rolls on and on and on. That’s definitely a big disincentive to living here.

The plus sides for me: It’s very open minded, liberal, live and let live and socially progressive as a 2020s society. There are good employment opportunities, with decent income. State services are very pro enterprise and things are accessible. In normal times vibrant cities and towns, increasingly interesting foodieness that isn’t locked in some fixed tradition (France, Italy etc). It’s very active, artsy and people seem to get involved in a lot of things.

You can have a good quality of life and if you want access to sunshine, it’s not far away and it’s cheap to get to. You also don’t have to live in Dublin.

I think one other issue if you’re in a place your whole life you don’t engage with it the same way as seeing it with fresh eyes. New places are exciting and you don’t initially see any of the cracks. Old places - you see everything, including the annoyances of politics etc

I’d say it’s very unlikely that you’ll be able to do that as it would just result in people remote working, cherry picking systems - social services and infrastructure etc would fall apart due to lack of tax revenues.

As it is, you can’t even do that between states in federal countries in a lot of cases.

As idyllic as it might be if you could do it, it isn’t likely to be politically feasible without a significant base somewhere.

That being said, the large corporations and super wealthy already do it with tax avoidance structures.

The EU in particular is odd as there are huge cost and income discrepancies between countries, south to north and east to west.

It could ultimately just balance those out though and you’d find things would eventually even and the income and cost gaps would vanish.

On healthcare, we do spend properly. The HSE budget is the same as the NHS budget per capita (and we've a younger population so it "should" be lower). We pay plenty but get nothing back.

Despite spending the same as the Brits on the public system, 46% of the population feel it necessary to have health insurance on top of that. And all your prescriptions on top of that.

Someone I know went to France a few months ago. Trip got off to a pretty bad start, her bag slipped as she was taking it from the overhead bin on the plane after landing and hit her eye. Long story short, as a tourist went to the first medical centre she found, under 2 hours later she'd seen a consultant, got eye drops and a bill for €27. Took the same person weeks of asking around (friends and relatives, because calling directly were instant "no"s) to just get on a doctor's books in our home town.

Again, someone on average wage is paying around 300 towards healthcare, plus insurance (let's lowball it at 100) plus tax on insurance so about €450 a month. What do they get for that? Well after claiming back it's "only" €30 to see a GP, "only" €100 for consultant and prescriptions aren't covered.

There's no defending our healthcare system money is absolutely poured into it from state funding for no return. We have parallel systems where it only makes logical sense for a worker to make the public system worse so they get more customers privately. And the state helps them out with doing it. It's an indefensible shambles.