I returned home from New Zealand in April. I’m 27 and have been working as a doctor since the summer of 2019. In the throes of the pandemic I was one of the lucky few whose plans to move to New Zealand were not impacted by the country’s strict entry criteria.
For the 18 months from August 2020 until January 2022, I enjoyed a country largely unaffected by Covid restrictions, a decent wage and a climate just balmy enough to grow citrus fruits. When the Covid cases in New Zealand ramped up over Christmas 2021, and I heard things in Ireland were loosening again, I began to feel the call to come home.
The day I arrived back was dark and drizzly. In some ways that was a great comfort and reassured me that I was in fact once again on Irish soil. I used my week of jet lag to roam around Dublin through familiar neighbourhoods and marvel at what had changed and what was exactly the same.
To hear people with my accent all around me, to be immersed once again in dubious weather and the friendliness of strangers were novelties in a way. I was walking around with a grin plastered on my face while other people went about their days, taking in their stride the things I had forgotten I loved about my country. In my old Aldi, an employee I’d never interacted with before leaving said “You’re back!” with a familiarity I never would have guessed I deserved.
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Small things had changed. The RTÉ jingle was new. Dublin buses are now different colours. My neighbours have a new puppy who is the darling of the neighbourhood.
There are also big things that have changed. The friends I’ve caught up with, who are (surprise, surprise) also doctors, for the most part maintain a sunny attitude while they tell me how awful their lives have been for the past 18 months. They tell gut-wrenchingly awful stories about the things that they have had to do at work and the compromises they have had to make with their lives, their relationships and their finances, but turn them into humorous anecdotes, because they can’t cope any other way.
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I returned to work in July – not a second sooner, as I think things in the HSE are dark and are about to get even darker. My colleagues who are finishing schemes need time off to pull their own physical and mental health together. Other colleagues are leaving in droves for the paradise of Australia and New Zealand, countries where they will work fair hours for fair money and rent rooms they can actually afford.
The tantalising lure of what the Aussies and the Kiwis consider bog standard will leave a huge hole in the workforce that will cripple those who are left in Ireland.
I have to come back to a health system that has no money, not enough doctors and disjointed, incompatible IT systems that are archaic enough to make Pac-Man look as if he’d pass the Turing test. The national electronic dispensing records in New Zealand that helped me identify addicts and what help they needed in the emergency department are a distant dream (a distance of 18,628km, to be exact).
Kiwi doctors have things the way they are because they complain. They don’t stand for substandard treatment, and when they see something they want to change they work with their government to amend it. They are not that different from us.
When I was abroad I took comfort from the fact that we have the same interests, share a sense of humour and take the same laid-back attitude to life in general. How did two countries at opposite ends of the world come to be the only ones to refer to swimsuits as togs? So I have to ask: what are the Kiwis doing that we aren’t? Is it part of our nature in Ireland to simply cope in the face of adversity because we’re too meek to complain?
Don’t get me wrong. I love being home. Seeing my family and friends again has lifted my heart. Watching Ireland bloom back into the Emerald Isle for the summer is incredible. Swimming in the sea with my dad leaves me shivering and ecstatic. I have picked up my flute and played tunes till my face cramps, and seeing Cormac Begley play his bass concertina at the Borris festival awoke a tribal joy I could only possibly feel among my kin.
These are my people, and this is my home. I don’t want to leave again, but unless things change I may not have a choice.
If you live overseas and would like to share your experience with Irish Times Abroad, email abroad@irishtimes.com with a little information about you and what you do
