Home truths from abroad

Every direction we went in Dublin we were hitting brick walls. The money we had saved over years we were using to live on, and though I had never thought of emigrating, I'm so much happier with the life we have now." Jenny O'Brien (25), her partner, Tim Shiels, and their three-year-old twins left the Republic in February, because they couldn't afford a house here. Now they live in a three-bedroom house in Little Neston, a village over the Mersey from Liverpool. O'Brien says the move has given them a real life.

She is a qualified care worker while Shiels, who is from Derry, was working in Dublin as a trainee manager with a DIY chain. The family is, it seems, typical of the new breed of Irish emigrants: young, hardworking and competent, with good jobs but no way to afford a home in the Republic.

"Of the almost 2,000 clients we had last year, 8.5 per cent were leaving Ireland, almost specifically Dublin, for the UK because of the housing crisis," says Paula O'Sullivan of the Emigrant Advice Centre. "This compares with 6 per cent for the previous year. Most are going to England, but some are heading to Germany and Holland."

For O'Brien, things had been going very well in Dublin at first. "We were both in well-paid jobs and saving while we rented a big flat in Stoneybatter." After the twins arrived, she considered going back to work, but the cost of childcare for two made it uneconomical.

"So we decided we could manage with just Tim working. We were living in a fine, large flat, everything was great and we had saved about £3,000." Then the house their flat was in was put up for sale.

"We panicked, really," she says. They hoped to avail of the shared-ownership scheme, whereby the local authority - in their case Dublin Corporation - would put up half the cost of a home and lend them the other half as if they were taking out a mortgage, according to employment and income criteria. The applicant pays rent for half the house and pays a mortgage on the other half, with a view to buying the full house within 25 years.

The highest grant they could hope for, says O'Brien, would allow them to buy a house for £90,000. "We registered with about 10 estate agents, and some wouldn't even take us on the books, said there was no point, that there wasn't a hope of finding somewhere for less than £100,000 in Dublin.

"The only other thing we could afford was to rent for a while. We found a small house for £800 a month. We had to pay out an £800 deposit, so that dramatically cut our savings."

The couple "went through so many options", O'Brien says. She thought about going back to work while Shiels stayed at home, as she had earned about £100 a month more than he had before the twins' arrival. They wondered whether she could go back to college to get higher qualifications.

She investigated a community-employment scheme but was a year too young. They approached their TDs, one of whom appealed to the corporation for an increase in their rent allowance.

She also had an interview with F┴S, but with no childcare "that was a dead end, too," she says.

"The only other thing was to move way out of the city - to, say, Meath or Carlow - but we didn't have a car and no money for driving lessons, anyway."

This brought the couple to Christmas and, for O'Brien, the feeling that they had wasted a lot of effort. Their savings had been more than halved and both of them had lost weight.

"My dad, who lives in Little Neston, was over for Christmas. When he saw how stressed out we were, and how thin we both got, he got really worried and said he would look for places to rent in England."

She says the idea of moving to England frightened her at first, but there seemed no other option. Indeed, she says, all the corporation could offer was hostel accommodation if they felt unable to continue with the private accommodation they were struggling to afford to rent.

"In the first week of looking, Dad found three-bedroom houses around Little Neston for between £250 and £420 a month. Then we realised a mortgage would be cheaper."

They began searching in earnest in late January. The second house they looked at, she says, "was perfect". The house was "really big, really spacious", and it would cost them £42,000, with no stamp duty.

"And that was it. We literally decided and did it all within a month. My dad came over with a van and off we went. I did cry when we left, but it's six months now and it's more a relief than anything."

In terms of numbers and profiles, emigration is changing. Some 22,300 people left the State last year, down from 29,000 the year before and an average of 50,000 a year when emigration was at its height, in the 1950s. According to figures from the Central Statistics Office, 28 per cent of last year's emigrants went to Britain. Most were aged 15-24 and almost all were under 45.

Gerry Kivlehan, director of the London Irish Centre, says many of these are fleeing the housing crisis at home. "What we are seeing now is that those who do come looking for advice are either qualified people who just cannot afford to live at home or the very desperate, who come totally unprepared, typically at the weekend when none of the social services is open, with no form of ID and very little money," he says.

"Many just haven't been able to access local-authority housing, and with the cost of private rented accommodation so high now in Dublin, they have a choice, as they see it, of either becoming homeless or getting on the boat to England."

Paula O'Sullivan, too, says more and more people ring asking not about benefits or similar issues, but about housing availability in the UK. Here, it is not uncommon to be on the housing list for five years. In Britain, the typical wait is between a month and a year.

O'Sullivan has heard it all over the past year: a Dublin couple living in bed-and-breakfast accommodation for more than a year with three young children; a man in his 30s, recently released from hospital, who needed aftercare and couldn't get into any of the hostels; an elderly man who had been living in a mobile home but had to leave it in the winter, when the site's owner decided to make it a summer-only facility.

"The reality is that certain people, especially those with families, will be housed more quickly in certain parts of the UK," she says.

The crisis is also deterring emigrants who want to come back to the Republic. O'Sullivan says many people find the decision to come home far more difficult than the decision to emigrate: the move may involve sacrificing a job or leaving family, friends and neighbours. To have taken such a decision and have the plan dashed because the Republic has priced them out of the housing market can be very distressing, she says.

"I had one case recently of an elderly couple in Manchester wishing to retire to Ireland. They weren't able to, because they just couldn't find any kind of housing at all with the proceeds of their house sale in Manchester," she says. "They had to stay where they were."

O'Brien and Shiels now live about half an hour outside Liverpool, and 25 minutes from Chester. Tim is working as the manager of a motorcycle and scooter shop in the city and earns about £13,000 a year. They are also entitled to benefits of about £65 a week.

"Our money goes much further over here," says O'Brien, "and Tim has much better hours. We bought him a scooter and we also got a second-hand car. So he leaves at about 8.15 in the morning and he's home at about 6 or 6.15 in the evening. In Dublin, he was working so many late nights that he'd be leaving at 7 a.m., and by the time he'd get home, at about 10 p.m., the kids would be in bed and I'd be crashed out on the couch, ready for my bed."

She has applied to study midwifery and is delighted that the course offers childcare. There are also crΦches in the village. One is a nursery and the other a playgroup for 2- to 5-year-olds. Both are run by the local council and cost £3.50 a day for each child.

They plan to take their summer holidays in Dublin, and though O'Brien "absolutely misses" the city and her friends - "I'd have them all over here immediately if I could" - she and her family are "a lot happier, a lot less stressed".

"We have a social life, can plan to go on holidays, buy things for the kids. I'm half a stone heavier," she laughs.

A number of her friends are also considering emigrating, with one couple looking at going to Liverpool and another she knows planning on moving to Germany.

"You see, just living in Dublin can be too much like hard work. Over here, we have a life."