How to emigrate to Ireland?
“I have great grandparents who emigrated from ireland and my grandparent was born here. Might be a narrow miss.” Not so much, in fact. Your qualifying parent and/or grandparent can claim Irish citizenship (in the form of an Irish passport) right now. At that point you become the child/grandchild of a living Irish citizen. Plus if the great-grandparent was from present-day Northern Ireland, your opportunities for citizenship in the present-day republic are even more lax. Nobody seems yet to have explicitly told you that an Irish passport allows you to work anywhere in the EU, and in the UK you are legally all-but-indistinguishable from a UK passport holder (you can even vote in national elections). [An observation about the IT market: if your skills are not in the MS / Java realm, there’s no bloody work here at all. Unless you want to do tech support for Apple in Cork. ‘Open’ technology jobs, if they exist, don’t get advertised anywhere. And Ireland’s economy, job market and entire nati
Hmm… I’ve been living in Dublin since Sept 06 as a Fulbright Scholar. My time here is almost done and I certainly have grown to love being here. I am looking forward to returning to the US, not because of any shortcomings of Ireland, but because I still consider the US my home. I could see living here in Ireland a few more years and being perfectly happy. Eventually, I know I would be really itchy to go back to the US. You don’t say a lot about what prompted the switch on an emotional level other than that you feel more “continental than american.” I’m nitpicking, but this is an important point : to refer to something as “continental” is actually to separate France, Germany and the rest of Europe from the UK and Ireland. The culture here in Ireland is not necessarily like other parts of Europe. In fact, I posited to a few different Irish acquaintances that Ireland is the last European country that still loves the US and they’ve all agreed. If you loved, say, Paris or Prague, you migh
