The € 750 Tax Credit, does the Irish Government really want young Irish Graduates to stay in Ireland?

rustbucket said:
Housing issue in Ireland
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Young graduates are leaving because they don't want to spend the rest of their lives sharing squalid bedrooms with strangers, because they can't pay 2,800 a month to rent a one bedroom apartment and because buying is equally unattainable. Gimmicky tax break proposals suggest that the government either doesn't understand this or is desperately trying to distract from it.
 
That's a very Dublin-centric view of things; hardly surprising given your username though!

Maybe part of the solution would be recognizing there's life beyond the Pale...
 
torblednam said:
That's a very Dublin-centric view of things; hardly surprising given your username though!

Maybe part of the solution would be recognizing there's life beyond the Pale...
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The cities are where most graduate jobs are. Plus many people in their 20s aren't too keen to move to rural Laois. Dublin needs thousands of apartment blocks like they exist in every comparable EU city. Land & money are available but the government has wasted 15 years making excuses for not building them. It's artificially induced scarcity pandering to middle class nimbyism & vested interests. Mass graduate emigration is seen as a price worth paying.
 
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I think a good discussion / study is required on "emigration". I use the inverted commas because emigration is generally seen as a permanent move. Much of what is referred to as emigration in Ireland is not intended to be permanent. Of course some turns out to be.

We are a relatively small island nation with one really sizeable city. It's not uncommon for people in larger countries to move within for work or new experiences. Someone may move from Dallas to San Francisco or New York which is far greater from a time perspective in comparison to Dublin to London. I actually think there is a benefit to Irish people spending some time working outside Ireland.

We need to acknowledge that there will always be a healthy baseline level of "emigration" and that a percentage of those will meet someone / be happy there and stay.

Much of the "emigration" is to high cost of living countries / cities as opposed to cities that may offer the best value. However it's also to cities that perform really well from a liveable perspective. Most also have much better weather. It doesn't feel so bad to be paying high rent when the lifestyle is good. We might not be able to fix the weather but I think Dublin and other Irish cities are a long way behind from a "liveable" perspective. There is also the issue of expensive but available accommodation. In Ireland at the moment even if you want to pay the going rate there is often nothing there.

One of the issues is that much of the immigration is to Australia or Canada which have expensive flight and large time zone changes. A visit home every couple of years can become the norm. Thing would be much different if the large numbers were based around Europe and say 4hours door to door. I have lived in Canada and had friend in London and Amsterdam all from Ireland. The "immigration" experience was night and day. Lads in London never missed a wedding or a stag etc,

I don't really have much time for anyone who goes to the Middle East and wants to compare it to Ireland on salary, taxes, lifestyle etc.
 
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Why are they set on emigrating?
 
I prefer to look at cold hard numbers when it comes to this.

From the HEA stats, 91% of undergraduates in 2021 were employed in Ireland so the vast majority of graduates are not emigrating.

Secondly, there is no doubt that housing is an issue but there is also a matter of expectations. I'm part of a generation that lived in shared houses for 10 years after graduating and didn't think anything about it and was well into my 30s before I took out a mortgage. It took me 10 years and 3 houses to get to my "forever home". Maybe expectations of a modern generation are unrealistic.

And if you can't find a house or flat to rent in Dublin, fine, don't work there. Work somewhere else in Ireland. No shortage of jobs out there and Dublin is not the be all and end all.
 
I heard the same arguments when I left college, although we had the addition of poorer job prospects.

However as a Dubliner I lived at home at college and couldn’t wait to get away.

My kids are the same. They also had the joy of covid so final college years were frankly awful.

So they packed up and headed off to have fun and see new places and faces. Luckily for me they stayed in Europe.

They are renting, one on his own which is so expensive the other is sharing so not so bad. I can see one returning sometime, the other not so sure. Plenty of jobs in Dublin for them but the standard of apartments where they live is amazing compared to the same budget in Dublin. Salaries are about the same, taxes are higher so take home is less but they don’t need cars, they can get to Paris or Belin easily for a weekend, medical care is affordable. Pluses and minuses. But they are spreading their wings.

Yes they could have moved to a provincial town and had more affordable homes but less fun I suspect. Weekend in portlaoise v Paris?

We meet up in cities for long weekends and visit them where they live.

10 years time when they want to maybe start families… that’s when it’s less fun. When I hit that stage I left London and moved back to Dublin. They may do the same. About half my fellow emigrants from 1988 returned.

€750 a year tax credit wouldn’t have made on jot of a difference
 
Great post.

That’s a fascinating stat - 91% of undergraduates employed in Ireland. We just seem to hear a lot from the whinging 9%, who probably aren’t even 9% when you take out high-end migration.

The noisiest bunch seem to be the ones you’ve highlighted - the ones with unrealistic expectations and either a lack of work ethic or a miguided wish to work in some underpaid field (freelance journalism).
 
Latest statistics from the CSO show 64k people left Ireland and 142k people moved here in the year ending April 23. 42k of those arriving were Ukrainian.
If you break it down into Irish citizens, 30500 left, 29600 returned. so almost 1-1. This is still around 20% less then those who emigrated after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger.

If you compare this back to the 80s and 90s. 25% of graduates were emigrating in that period (and I was one of them). That's in line with my own experiences where 20 of us used to meet up every month in London where we were all living.

There has been a change in emigration trends in my view where an element of it now is temporary migration, where people move to the Middle East, for example, for a number of years to make some money/party and then return, especially once kids start to arrive. I can name a lot like that. It's almost compulsory now for when a teacher is made permanent that the first thing they do is take a leave of absence and head for Dubai.

Never ceases to amaze me how Irish people will happily house share in Melbourne but complain about having to do it here
 

Weather / lifestyle plays a part for sure.

I can't understand how the teacher career break doesn't get more attention. Is this not the reason there is so many temp positions available but not permanent? However it seems to be a boat no one wants to rock.

I don't blame teachers for going. To be honest you would be mad not to go. Your job sitting there waiting for you to come back for up to 5 years!

Teaching also seems to be the one area where there are very few immigrates working. Unfortunately not possible for them to understand the system by teacher friend tells me. They do okay in all other professions...
 
Gordon Gekko said:
There is also the merit in going somewhere for a few years. I chose to go to the UK for a while, for example.
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Irish workers are the most mobile in the world.

Most of them “boomerang” and return home with more skills. This happens in booms and recessions both. I’ve done it myself and €750 a year wouldn’t have swung it.

Newspaper articles always mention the outflows but rarely the inflows.
 
faketales said:
Teaching also seems to be the one area where there are very few immigrates working. Unfortunately not possible for them to understand the system by teacher friend tells me. They do okay in all other professions...
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Very few immigrant primary teachers but I am seeing an increase in immigrant secondary teachers, my kids have teachers from Wales and France at the minute for example but it varies per subject
 
Presumably Irish language requirements for primary school has something to do with stopping EU teachers from practicing.
If they were more enlightened a French or other European native school teacher should be considered a bonus, not an impediment! to teach.
 
We would need another referendum! The constitution would have to be changed first as Irish is the first language of the country.
 
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