If it feels like everyone from Ireland just moved to Australia, that’s because they kind of did. A 16-year-record-breaking number of visas were granted last year for Irish young people hoping to spend at least a year Down Under.
I was staying in Dublin for the second half of 2023, and nearly every young person I talked to felt Australia’s tug in some form. If they weren’t moving here, they were thinking about it, or their sister was, or they’d just come home, or their best friends were already over. When my friend’s siblings left for a three week visit, his mum’s neighbour shook her head sadly and declared, “You’ve already lost them.”
Most of the young people making this move are on the Working Holiday Visa (WHV) – which is available for 18-35 year olds, easy to get, automatically grants partial working rights, and can be extended for multiple years if you do a few months in a qualified job.
Emigration has been a huge part of life in Ireland for a long time, but the exodus is exploding right now. It’s not exactly hard to guess why people are leaving: the economy is mostly terrible if you don’t work in foreign-owned tech or pharma sectors, and the Dublin rental crisis is among the worst in the world. It all feels a bit hopeless, and young people are looking for somewhere else to go.
They’re off to Canada if they can handle the cold, Berlin if they’re artsy and love cheap cigarettes, America if they can snag the right visa… but Australia has a special hold.
Between July 2022 and June 2023, an astounding 21,525 Irish people got the WHV to Australia. I keep thinking about this number. Ireland isn’t a huge country – there’s about 5 million in the republic total – and only 18-35-year-olds are able to apply for a WHV. 21,525 has to be a pretty significant portion of that demographic.
Why did everyone choose Australia? Don’t they know there’s a housing crisis here too? What does it mean for everyone who was left behind? I spoke with a few Irish people – both in Australia and back in Ireland – to find out.
Alexis and Eoghan: An emigrated social life
The first person I reached out to was my friend Alexis, 28. He’s from Bailieborough, a small town in the border region of Ireland, and lives in Dublin.
The social scene in a lot of Ireland, he tells me, has entirely hollowed out. There’s very limited social life in areas like his hometown, where the young people have either emigrated or moved to bigger cities like Dublin or Cork.
Alexis says that his brother, Eoghan, recently visited Australia and absolutely loved it. He was able to reconnect with friends, but also had multiple random encounters, like going to a bar in Brisbane and, by pure coincidence, seeing a group of people from school sat right beside him.
“What’s interesting is that if you went to a bar in our hometown, you’re less likely to meet someone from your class than at a bar in Brisbane. There are many, many more Irish people in Australian cities that I would know than I would know in my hometown at the moment,” said Alexis.
Turns out: if you’re an Irish 20-something being priced out of your country, it’s pretty easy to feel at home in Australia. It doesn’t take a huge cultural adjustment or require you to learn a new language, and there’s a good chance you already have a network here to simply fall into.
I ask about the financial aspect of it all. Yes, Dublin is expensive – but is moving somewhere like Sydney actually better?
Alexis says the sense is that Australia is expensive, but that wages reflect the cost of living better. A lot of people head over hoping to land a job that will let them save up and return home with a bit more financial security.
In Ireland, you hear about friends-of-friends who work as lollipop ladies in Australia and earn 200k a year. You hear about people in construction jobs who work 10am to 4pm with a bunch of smoke breaks and a leisurely lunch.
“These stories are so typical,” Alexis says, “You hear about Irish people who fell into huge opportunities that just wouldn’t be possible here.”
From an Australian perspective, this might sound weird. The Australian dollar is much weaker than the Euro, and so it seems more reasonable for an Irish person to come to Australia with their already-made Euro, convert it into AUD, and watch it go further. This is certainly what some people are doing, but there is genuinely a sense in many Irish conversations that Australia is a better place to earn.
Some people say that if they stick around long term, they hope to see the Australian dollar come back up. Others are attracted to the idea that Australia has a more diverse economy than Ireland, where high-paying jobs are extremely concentrated in a couple specific sectors. If you work for Pfizer, then Dublin’s great – but if you want to join the Irish FIFO industry, good luck finding it.
A quick Google supports the idea that the average salary for a full-time worker is a bit higher in Australia than Ireland, even when you convert it back to Euro. Of course, a country’s “average” salary doesn’t paint a complete picture of an economy. It could be skewed by a small number of hyper-wealthy people, or factors that won’t really play out in a typical person’s job search.
The point isn’t that Australia will make everyone rich – but that if you’re in Ireland searching average national salaries on your phone, the first results could make you feel like it will. It might confirm an inkling you’ve always had, remind you of a story about someone’s uncle who made fortunes down under, and feed the outsized expectations that began back when Australia had a stronger currency.
Ultimately, the outsider view of Australia (and it’s not just from the Irish) is a perception of possibility. Cushy, lucrative jobs, long days on the beach, a chilled out, laid back lifestyle. As long as these rumours float around it’s going to look pretty attractive to Irish young adults without a lot of options.
Jay: The disillusion of the Australian dream
I first heard about Jay and his friends through my sister’s boyfriend. He was talking about six of his friends who were preparing to move to Melbourne together. They’d all applied for WHVs and were about to move to Australia to work slightly different hospo jobs and share a big house.
My sister’s boyfriend found it a little goofy, a crystallisation of what he found funny about the Australia trend in the first place: Why would you move across the world to live approximately the same life?
This was August, 2023 – by the time I began writing this, Jay had already left Australia and headed home early, although some of the group had stayed behind.
I caught up with Jay to get a better picture of his time here: why he’d come and why he’d left.
Jay had lived in Europe his entire life. He was dissatisfied with the high cost-of-living and he wanted to try something new. He’d heard the stories about Australia: “The beach parties, the massive paychecks, the vast open spaces to enjoy yourself.”
When Jay first got to Melbourne, it was great – although he thinks the fun of the early days may have been fueled by the novelty of the move. He got a landscaping job quickly through a friend, and the whole group moved to Fitzroy.
After a little while, financial issues crept in. Although Australia is known among Irish people as a place of financial prosperity, he felt that Melbourne was too expensive to live comfortably. The sprawling city made getting around a chore and limited the exploration they could reasonably do – a drive that gets you from coast-to-coast in Ireland barely gets you out of Melbourne’s metro area. Instead of feeling like a working holiday, it all just started to seem like…work.
He’d had a good job back home that he’d left to dig holes in the Australian sun – a factor that distinguishes him from a lot of Irish young adults, who might not have as much to lose. He was stressed about money, stressed about work, stressed about the way that all these other stresses prevented him from having fun and actually experiencing Australia.
“The stories of a backpacker’s paradise just don’t seem as attainable as it once was.”
Unless it is.
Alex: Paving a new life in Australia
Not everyone I spoke with found Melbourne unaffordable and disappointing. For some people, like Alex (@alex_holden26 on TikTok), 25, Australia really was the key to turning things around.
Last September, Alex and her partner moved from Dublin to Australia. Before the move, she’d felt stuck in a rut. Like 68% of Irish people between 25-29, she lived at home. She didn’t particularly like her job. Even though she and her partner both worked full-time, rent in Dublin – or even in neighbouring county Meath – was too steep to justify. She was trying to save for a house but that’s a slow and disheartening goal.
One day, she’d had enough:
“[I] was like, What am I doing? I’ve my whole life to buy a home. Just give Australia a go. It can’t be any worse,” said Alex.
So far, Alex loves it here. She’d like to stay long term, although the visa process can be a nightmare, especially without a university degree. It took her a little while to make friends, but the move pushed her out of her comfort zone in a way that ultimately benefited her. She’s loved how Australia has challenged her to try new things, meet new people, and work jobs she wouldn’t have considered back home.
I ask about how she finds Australia’s cost-of-living compared to Dublin. She says she totally understands why Australians find life expensive – it is – but in her experience, it just hasn’t been as bad.
She tells me that her rent goes further in Melbourne. Here, she and her partner can split $2500 for a modern apartment in the city with a pool, gym, and nearby public transit. This feels much better than Dublin, where you might pay that same price for rock-bottom accommodations and the average apartment goes for the equivalent of nearly $4000 AUD monthly (no gym, no pool).
It’s striking how differently Jay and Alex compare Dublin and Melbourne prices. Their conflicting accounts speak to something I’ve been thinking about ever since I moved here – how hard it is to truly translate prices between countries.
Of course, you can do a direct currency conversion, but that doesn’t tell the full story. It doesn’t reveal how much you make here, how much you made there, how the economy touches your particular industry, whether you stumbled into a great deal in one city, what services the government subsidises, the prices of the specific groceries you like to eat.
Fresh mozzarella and cigarettes cost more in Australia than in Ireland, but utilities run a bit lower and little hand-held sushi rolls are delightfully cheap.
“I hate the way people say, ‘Aw, it’s so far’,” says Alex. “If you give it a go and it’s not for you, you just go home. It’s really not that far – you can be home in one day. What’s one day out of the thousands of days you will live throughout your life?”
Of course, the plane ride is expensive, uncomfortable, and long, but I get what she’s saying: it’s not a four month sea voyage where you might get dysentery and die.
Whether you’re searching for young faces in a cleared-out Irish town or joining an Irish-run GAA team in St. Kilda, this migration is reshaping both countries.
There are tens of thousands of people who will each have to decide if the move was worth it. Some people will chase rumours of cushy jobs and better lives, only to find they’ve traded one housing crisis for another. Others will delight in their new apartment pools, stumble upon lucrative opportunities, or revel in the weird reality of feeling more at home in a bar across the world than in the town where you grew up. Many of the Irish people who move to Australia will trickle back home, but some will find reasons to stay.
As planes keep ferrying Irish twenty-somethings to Aussie shores, questions remain: Can Ireland fix its economy and keep its youth? Will Australia stay the promised land, or will people feel disappointed once they calculate the exchange rate?
One thing’s clear: this isn’t just about two countries. It’s a snapshot of our globalised world, where opportunity hops continents and the search for a decent life can land you on the other side of the planet.
As long as Dublin keeps pricing out its youth and Australia keeps dangling those sweet, sweet working holiday visas, I wouldn’t expect this wave to crash anytime soon.
Lead image: Supplied
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