GOODBYE IRELAND
As more of us are being allowed to work from home, for many that’s a plane journey away – but with a cheaper cost of living and family life beckoning, these foreign workers are saying farewell
‘There’s flexibility, we are coming back, it’s not a forever thing’
THE country of a thousand welcomes is waving a thousand goodbyes to our expat workforce. While the pandemic has interrupted all of our plans, for foreign nationals the ripple of uncertainty soon comes down to a decision: To stay or to go?
Some of those leaving are simply embracing the new-found working flexibility, with ‘work-from-home’ policies extended for an indefinite length of time.
But others are making the decision to leave Ireland for good.
Airports are frequent scenes of tearful goodbyes, but in these unusual times, there is hardly a soul present at Dublin Aiport to witness any tears being shed as people see their lives suddenly uprooted and life maps changed.
The Irish Daily Mail spoke to expats getting on some of the flights leaving Dublin Airport to understand the reasons behind their decision to leave.
Some have lost their Irish jobs and felt forced to return to the country of their birth. Others were more fortunate: they are taking their ‘good jobs’ and wages with them to foreign lands, where the cost of living is cheaper, they are closer to their families and, no doubt, the sun shines more often.
Whatever the factors behind their leaving, their departure from Ireland will have serious ramifications for the country and its economy that might not be truly visible for some time to come.
The one thing the coronavirus lockdown has proved to many businesses is that working remotely is possible and expats are leading the way in showing us just how remotely this arrangement can work.
In Ireland’s ‘Silicon Docks’, the offices around Dublin’s tech district — stretching from Grand Canal Dock to the IFSC — have been mostly empty since March.
Tech giants based there, such as Google, Facebook and LinkedIn, employ more than 12,000 workers in the city between them and thousands of these jobs are held by foreign nationals.
Companies have embraced the new flexible working arrangements so much so that their employees are granted the freedom to leave Ireland to work from home in another country.
With better weather and less lockdown restrictions than Ireland, working from home in their own countries is a very attractive option for Ireland’s expat workers and many are taking their bosses up on the offer. Jasmin Loidl from Austria works in one of the multinational tech companies in the district and has been in Ireland for a year and a half.
‘We have the opportunity to work from our home country,’ she says. ‘There’s a process and we’re allowed to go.
‘There’s a flexibility in terms of, we don’t really know how long we can go. It’s kind of more on a month-to-month basis because obviously our jobs are here.
‘So we are coming back, it’s not a forever thing. For me it’s going to be for the