Go east, young man

Part 3

by Ellen Barry

Reports from the other side are breathless and enthusiastic. Unpacked, Dublin's young professionals say the return is paying off; they describe a city bursting at the seams with nightlife and new money. Garret Pearse, 25, a software engineer who recently moved back after three years in Boston, found his new job in a week and a half. Deirdre Murphy, 25, walked into a job as a fund manager. And Marie Murray, 25, found a position as an occupational therapist two weeks after arriving home. For university graduates, it's a common story; they have never been such a commodity.

"If you think that you want to move home eventually, now is the time to do it. Jobs have never been so easy to find," says Pearse. "If you look around Dublin, all you can see is cranes."

Part of the buzz is generated by the returnees themselves, who are arriving back in a steady stream, lured in part by recruitment campaigns that emphasize "craic," which can be loosely translated as "fun." Old friends are resurfacing from every direction. Fourteen people graduated with Murphy in her university's department and seven of them emigrated in 1993; of those, five have now returned to Ireland to live, she says.

"There's a huge number of people coming back," she says. "Dublin is kind of booming at the moment."

The jobs are specialized, granted, but the advertisements have added some 15 pages to the Irish Times newspaper's job listings and are recruiting emigrants in England with the ringing imperative "Your Country Needs You." With the housing market booming, there's a market for skilled laborers ("Bricklayers are making savage money," says recent returnee Anthony Walsh), and Irish construction workers in America are beginning to think they could actually earn more working in Ireland. University graduates in the high-tech sector are an even bigger commodity; under a national agreement, computer programmers are assured a 20 to 30 percent increase in pay every year, says one returnee.

The downside is that Dublin has become expensive and congested, returnees say. People are buying houses on the far outskirts of the city at vastly inflated prices. Income taxes are still high and, realistically, most returnees are unlikely to make more money than they made in the States. Still, though, Ireland's bigger cities have taken on the excitement of boom towns -- people are a little more worldly, their clothes are more fashionable, they go out to dinner more frequently.

"Life has changed," says Neilus Reynolds, 32, who left Boston last year for his native Galway to open a pub. "People are taking more chances."

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Ellen Barry can be reached at ebarry[a]phx.com.