I EXPERIENCE A strange feeling when the Revolut notification pops up asking if I want to know how much I spent on my “trip to Ireland”.
Not because I am fearful of the financial insight offered (although word of advice, Revolut, no Dublin tourist has ever wanted to know that information). Instead, I am conflicted because my trip to Dublin wasn’t a holiday, just a visit home.
Like many of my generation — the first to be poorer than their parents, the Celtic Tiger’s “bailout babies” and, of course, the target audience for the Irish Government’s ill-advised ‘how to cope with living at home’ video — I emigrated after completing my undergraduate degree.
It’s a funny word to use, emigrated. I can’t quite think of myself as someone who falls into this category. In my brain, that is a term reserved for those who have travelled thousands of miles from family and have to arrange connecting flights to visit home.
I know those people. They have set up lives in Australia, Singapore and Canada. They have squashed as much as they can fit into a TK Maxx suitcase and hauled it across the Atlantic. They have met new family members over Zoom and missed Christmases and birthdays with painful resignation.
My version of emigrating looks a lot more like taking a Ryanair flight across the Irish Sea and swapping grey, rainy Dublin for grey, rainy Edinburgh. It doesn’t quite feel justified to consider this emigration when I am aware of the lengthy journeys of peers. It is as if what can at times feel like a mass exodus of my peers has become such a force of 21st Irish culture that moving across to our closest neighbours no longer registers as emigration.
Anecdotes of the Australian exodus are familiar. But proximity to other European spots is masking a different form of emigration. The length of the flight doesn’t lessen the loss to the country.
‘Soft emigration’
Through this lens, my own move to Scotland embodies a form of soft emigration. So maybe I don’t feel I am justified to consider myself an emigrant in the traditional sense.
But my rationale for leaving: textbook 21st-century Irish emigrant. The kind of explanation that starts with a housing crisis and doesn’t really need to go much further. If emigration is an opportunity to open doors, then Scotland opened many for me. The doors of my first grown-up flat, for one. My very own classroom door for another.
These are doors I am not ready to close. But there are doors at home too. Ones I’ve spent the past two years trying to keep ajar from a distance. Doors with my height measured against the wood, doors of familiar haunts with sticky bar tables and old friends.
These days I have two homes. One my own, and a flat all grown. The other, so intimately known, my childhood home.
Having two homes is a million tiny conflicts. It’s a British tea blend that doesn’t taste the same but has been boiled in a kettle in my own flat, and that’s still a novelty worth so much.
It’s the day that I am stopped for directions and not only answer with an automatic confidence but also recommend a local lunch spot that they might like to try en route. It’s teaching a lesson on Scots Gaelic and wondering if teaching as Ghaeilge is in my near future.
It’s a dialect that slips between two sets of colloquialisms. A Ryanair return booking that can somehow fit the sentence “I’ll fly home on Friday and then fly home on Sunday night”. A home at both ends of the flight path. To go home or to come home.
The need to go
Within all of this resides the enormous privilege to have that choice. The privilege of being able to return home is my prerogative. Across our world, there are millions of people without that choice. There are those who have lost the option to return home due to climate change and economic disruption. Or those whose homes have been destroyed due to conflict or persecution.
Most well-known currently are the genocide in Gaza, the war in Sudan and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which have caused an obscene casualty toll and left a horrific number of vulnerable people fleeing turmoil. But the scale of those seeking asylum and refugee status cannot be attributed solely to individual countries or conflicts. According to the UNHCR, as of 2025, there are 117.3 million forcibly displaced people worldwide.
Irish emigration represents a different form of movement with different pull and push factors. We cannot acknowledge the routine nature of Irish emigration without acknowledging that this is only possible because of the ease with which Irish citizens are able to emigrate. The Irish passport is consistently ranked one of the most powerful for facilitating visa-free travel, with the Henley Passport Index placing Ireland in joint 4thin the 2026 rankings.
Many Irish graduates are drawn by opportunities for increased independence and cheaper postgraduate degrees. Moving to Scotland offered me both of these opportunities alongside the chance to join the rental market. It is perhaps indicative of the state of the Irish accommodation crisis that I refer to a desire to join the rental market and not the housing market.
The concept of joining the housing market seems so ludicrous and far-fetched that it does not even enter the realm of possibility. Amongst my friends and me, home-ownership is the inevitable butt of every joke. Although, as with any overplayed joke, the material has become less humorous and more resigned. At some point, moving down the hemisphere became as feasible an option as moving down the road.
A life in two places
Some days, having two places to call home, two sets of friends and collections of favourite local spots feels like an unimaginable privilege. It feels like I am successfully navigating an elegant dance along a fine line between two open doors. Other days, balancing two SIM cards, two phone numbers and two postcodes feels like fruitless and repetitive attempts to open a door with the incorrect key.
It feels less like being split in half and more like trying to hold onto two lives at once. Wishing desperately for a way to combine them or for a definitive answer to that nagging question, to stay or to go? Or perhaps to go further.
I scroll Instagram mindlessly, notice another “Australia has her now” caption. There is a niggling wonder whether it will ever have me. It raises a quiet curiosity: who will go next? Will they have been lured by Australian allure or chased out by choice?
When I tumbled home from a free GP appointment, followed by a free A&E visit, followed by a free prescription, I found myself drawing a mental comparison between the NHS and HSE. I do this less often now than I did two years ago. In those early stages, everything was a mental comparison. Every public service or community experience was evaluated in an attempt to qualitatively and definitively affirm my decision to stay or to stay away.
Two homes, one born, one made. Does that make one worthier than the other? Or does it burden them unfairly? I tune into headlines about the Irish housing crisis, and on every visit home, I observe the development of a new block of apartments. I cannot help but wonder if my resentment and frustration with Ireland’s accommodation crisis would be more intense if the opportunity to rent my own flat wasn’t reconcilable with an hour’s flight.
Moving to Scotland is a softened version of emigration, only in that it softens the painful edges of leaving the city I grew up in. I have not travelled far, but for the moment at least, it is just far enough to dilute my anger with a broken Irish housing system.
It is a decision I tangle with at every airport departure gate. And yet “single or return love?” asks the Eircoach driver. “Return please”.
Sophie Coffey is an Irish writer and journalist. She has previously written for publications including The Irish Times and Vice Media. She was the Opinion Editor of The University Times at Trinity College Dublin and was also a staff writer with Missy.ie. She is a primary school teacher currently living in Scotland.