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.

Through this lens, my own move to Scotland embodies a form of soft emigration. So maybe I don’t feel I am justified to........

© TheJournal