These days the Irish are more likely to be buying and selling buildings in London than they are to be constructing them, as Louise Eastdiscovers as she profiles some of the city's young Irish professionals - and rounds up some of her favourite things to do there
Like many Londoners, I never intended to live in London. I left Dublin to do a year-long MA in Norfolk, but as I sweated over my dissertation in the dog days of summer it occurred to me that my bags were packed and it might be fun to live in the city for a few months. Three years later I'm still here. Growing up young, free and single in Dublin, London was a constant "or" in my life. I could take the job or I could move to London. I could buy a flat or I could move to London. Friends who had made the move were thriving, so I knew it was no longer a place where the Irish came after dogs and "blacks" on the list of undesirables. Forty flights a day left Dublin airport; it was New York without the air fare or the visa.
Yet, when I visited, I was never very impressed. To me London was a series of interminable taxi rides through Identikit streets. When we arrived at our destination, everyone spent the first hour or so discussing how they got there. It was like Gertrude Stein's impression of Oakland, her home town: there appeared to be no "there" there.
Perhaps it was because I held such a low opinion of the place, or perhaps because I lucked out with a cheap sublet in a swanky part of town, but I loved London from the moment I arrived. There should be a word to describe the surprise you feel when a cliche turns out to be true; there is so much to do in London, and the variety is astonishing.
Fancy a Vietnamese beef pho? Yours for £5 on Kingsland Road. What about an open-air movie in an 18th-century courtyard? Sign up at Somerset House, on the Strand. Gavelan workshops, bluebell tours at Kew, clubbing at the End with an 8am finish, staging a pillow fight on the concourse of Paddington Station: people actually do these things.
And what about the notorious downsides of the place? It's huge, it's expensive, the people are rude and the Tube finishes at midnight. They're all true, but what I never understood about London before I lived here is that it offers a mix of village life and big-city living. People create communities to stave off the size of the place, but, crucially, a 10-minute Tube ride offers world-class cinema, music and shopping.
Once I got a bike the city shrank and a pattern emerged from the alphabet soup of streets. London can be expensive, but my London isn't: at the moment avocados are five for £1, and paintings hang on the streets of Soho courtesy of the National Gallery. People are sometimes shockingly rude, but the flip side is the liberation of anonymity; to walk through central London is to direct your own movie rather than star in it. You're looking out at the world rather than it looking at you.
I miss all the usual things about Dublin. Seeing my family whenever I want. The conversation. The passionate involvement people feel for the city. Swimming off the Forty Foot. But for me it was never an either-or situation; to paraphrase the old joke, the best thing about London are the cheap flights to Dublin.
Yet I never underestimate how my experience of London differs from that of so many Irish immigrants who came before. Like the other thirtysomethings on these pages, I'm living in London on my own terms, bound by nothing but my desire to live here. Far from struggling against discrimination, I'm basking in the reflected cool of my hip homeland. Nowadays the Irish in London tend to be towards the top of the pile, not bottom of the heap.
LISA HARRINGTON, OPERATIONS DIRECTOR
If building and nursing were once the Irish trades, call centres are our new expertise. "In the 1990s, Ireland was the call-centre Mecca," says the 35-year-old, pictured above, who as director of operations at BT Consumer is responsible for more than 12,000 call-centre agents and, indirectly, 10,000 engineers. "International call centres were absolutely pivotal to the Irish boom," she says.
She believes her current role's rule of thumb is: "There's always a crisis, and it will always happen at the weekend."
From customers not getting the right phone cable to a postal strike holding up the bill, it's Harrington's job to sort it out. Even at the weekend Harrington receives hourly texts telling her of average call-centre hold times.
"I'm always on," Harrington says. "But I like the fact that what we do has a tangible impact on people. It's quite black and white. You can see what makes a difference and what doesn't."
After a degree in German and politics at University College Dublin, Harrington spent 12 years at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). In 1996 she and her partner, Lorcan McHugh, also a consultant, moved to London.
"I love the diversity of London," says Harrington. "I don't work with British people, I work with every nationality under the sun. Culturally it's one of the best and brightest places in the world, and its potential for travelling elsewhere is second to none."
Both keen travellers, Harrington and McHugh took a year out in 2003 to do voluntary work in Uganda, an adventure that nearly ended in tragedy just two weeks in, when Harrington was thrown from a jeep, breaking her neck. Thankfully, the year ended with the pair back in Uganda, celebrating their engagement.
Last year marked something of a watershed for Harrington, as she was offered jobs in both London and Dublin, and finally decided to stay on in England.
"When I'm in Dublin I say I'm going home to London, but when I'm in London I say the same thing about Dublin. I don't see them as mutually exclusive. I do think I'll end up in Dublin, but choosing the job here and then buying a house was our way of saying we're committed for the next five years or so."
ROB KIRWAN, RECORD PRODUCER
Although he readily confesses to occasionally taking on projects because they offer "stupid amounts of money", nine times out of 10 the 37-year-old record producer and sound engineer works only with musicians he likes. "Ninety-nine per cent of what I do is instinctive. I listen and react. If I don't like it, it's much more like a job of work."
Bands such as New Order, Babyshambles, The Magic Numbers, U2, Depeche Mode and The Horrors have all benefited from Kirwan's instincts over the years, although he's particularly known for working with young bands.
"If you've never recorded before, you tend to start at the beginning and just play all the way through. What I do is put light and shade into a song. I pull out the dynamic bit, the big bit, the quiet bit. I tell each of them when to come in," says Kirwan. "I also mix the recording to make it sonically interesting, so it doesn't sound like every other band out there."
Kirwan got his break back in Dublin after he dropped out of a European-studies degree at Trinity College in Dublin to become a runner at Windmill Lane studios. Within a year he was working with the legendary producers Flood and Brian Eno on U2's Zooropa album.
"Right place, right time. I was incredibly lucky," says Kirwan, who still gets a kick out of being in a recording studio where "the stereo in the corner might cost £250,000. It constantly brings you back to being a kid getting a buzz out of making a record."
He moved to London, in 1998, "because the musical opportunities were far, far greater". Nine years on he's still here but is looking into whether it would be feasible to move back to Dublin.
"As well as all the usual reasons - friends and family - Dublin is just a much easier city to live in. In London I have friends who live a mile away but I see them twice a year. Everything has to be planned ahead. It sounds such a cliche, but I guess my head is in London but my heart is in Dublin."
JUSTINE MITCHELL, ACTOR
"I used to want to be an actor to show off and be really popular," says the 34-year-old. "Of course you realise soon enough that you're on a hiding to nothing if that's what you want, because you ain't gonna get it."
Mitchell is starring in Andrew Upton's new version of Gorky's The Philistines, at the National Theatre, having spent large portions of last year starring in its sell-out Coram Boy. In the autumn we'll be seeing her in the BBC's Waking the Dead, while she's on stage with John Lithgow in the Royal Shakespeare Company's Twelfth Night, in Stratford. "Now it's the boring bits I love. I like being a cog in a wheel. I like exploring character and telling a story."
Spare time is spent working on the comedy material she writes and performs with Emily Fairnam; type Mitchell's name into YouTube for a pitch-perfect snippet of her work.
"When you become an adult you usually stop going out to play and start drinking instead, but with acting you get to keep going out to play."
Mitchell initially moved to London to follow up her BA at Trinity College Dublin with a drama course. "When I left Trinity everybody I knew was moving to London, which meant that when I got here I had a ready-made group of friends. It's like a pyramid-sales scheme, in that everyone made new friends and introduced them to the others."
That was in 1996, and although she has been based in the city ever since she has spent a lot of time back in Dublin, working at the Gate (Michael Colgan was an early champion) and the Abbey. "That fulfilled a big dream, and I still love to work there. But I've made London my base."
She and her partner, the Dublin-born television producer Ben Kelly, live in Kensal Rise, where their neighbours are older-generation Irish immigrants. "A lot of Irish think they'll come to London temporarily, but that idea gradually erodes. I think I have a romantic notion of Ireland, but I know I'd find it hard to go back. I adore both cities."
SIMON McDONNELL, PROPERTY CONSULTANT
"Irish investors are very canny. They make decisions quickly and they know property. It's in their blood," says the 33-year-old, right, who has created a thriving company, Findlay Property, out of finding, letting and managing properties for Irish investors.
Although the company opened for business only in 2003, McDonnell and his business partner have already expanded into Scotland and, farther afield, Estonia. They head a multicultural team that includes a Danish handyman, Polish builders, a Turkish gas man and a couple of McDonnell's old friends from Dublin.
"We're a serious business, but we're sartorially casual. We all bike everywhere, so half the time I'm in lurid cycling gear. Clients who talk to us on the phone turn up expecting pinstripe suits."
McDonnell now has more than 100 properties on his books, from converted Victorian town houses to former council flats in east London, with more business rolling in every day.
Originally, though, McDonnell had no intention of settling in London. "I was living in Australia and had come to London to sort out my visa. I went out to get the paper, the sun was shining and I bumped into an old friend who lived here and who introduced me to the whole expat community here. Suddenly I realised that the vibrancy I was looking for in Australia was available here on Ireland's doorstep."
McDonnell's first London job was with AOL. "It was a really exciting time, because the whole dotcom boom was in full swing. Then, of course, that went sour, and it taught me never to trust a corporation again."
McDonnell finds it hard to envision a time when he will return to Dublin. "My girlfriend is Spanish, and although I love going home to visit I don't find living there an attractive proposition. For a start, property is so expensive."
Describing London as a "great rambling roller coaster of a city", he is only too conscious of how different his experience is to that of earlier Irish arrivals. "The days of Paddy immigrant are long gone. I've met so many well-educated, young, ambitious Irish people in London. There was an exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery last year which highlighted what an important role the Irish used to play in London life in the 19th century. We dominated the art world, media, the theatre - that's what we're returning to now."
JOHN DEVITT, GASTROPUB OWNER
"I'm very glad I came here," says the 38-year-old. "London is the world capital for food, mainly because it had so little cuisine of its own. The variety here is incredible."
Devitt co-owns a booming bar-restaurant in northwest London called the Island. Although it opened only last year, Devitt is already hard at work putting the next restaurant together and planning more.
"It was a painful birth," he says of the Island, "but we've finally convinced the locals. For me it's all about accessible food that's great quality but isn't hideously expensive."
It's all a far cry from 2000, when Devitt was a derivatives trader, earning big bucks and living the City-boy life. "Increasingly I wanted to create. I wanted to cook food that would be eaten by someone. In the City you create nothing."
As a regular customer at London's top restaurants Devitt knew where he wanted to work, and just three months after leaving the trading floor he had a job at Giorgio Locatelli's Zafferano restaurant. While Devitt had to deal with being a lowly commis chef on £12,000 a year, Locatelli's chefs were startled to find their new trainee was a 30-year-old city trader.
"Once they realised I wasn't a messer I had no problem," Devitt says. "It's a male-dominated environment, and, to be honest, chefs are pussycats compared to the monsters I met in the City."
Stints at the Real Greek and Pengelleys followed, as Devitt picked up the experience he needed to open his own place.
"I still have desires to go down the restaurant route," Devitt says. "But, to be honest, bar-restaurants are where I like to eat myself, and on the whole it's best to create the kind of place you yourself would use.
"For me staying in Dublin was never an option, but now I'm thinking I'd probably like to do business there sometime. Dublin's a great place to visit, but after 15 years here I do consider London my home."
GAVIN BUCKLEY, FILM EDITOR
"I always say I never made the decision to live in London," says the 35-year-old first assistant film editor, who has credits on Vera Drake, Tomorrow Never Dies, Ordinary Decent Criminal and the forthcoming Frank Oz movie Death at a Funeral under his belt.
A native of Sandycove, he left Dublin in 1994, fresh from University College Dublin, to do a diploma in film production in Bristol. "Everyone on the course kind of fell back to London after the course finished, and I fell back with them."
It wasn't long before Buckley, "23 and a cheeky sod", got his first lucky break, converting a McJob as a driver on a BBC children's production into a stint as a trainee editor. "It's about being in the right place and it's about asking. People will never know what you want if you don't ask."
Another stroke of good fortune - a chance meeting with the Oscar-winning editor Jim Clark on the set of the Ralph Fiennes movie Onegin - yielded an on-off working relationship that Buckley likens to a marriage. "Or, to put it another way, I'm like the caddie. I don't take the shot, but I make sure everything's in place for the perfect shot to take place."
Since 1998 the pair have worked together on several films; they are currently working on their second Mike Leigh film. "Working for someone like Mike is not like a job at all. Getting up in the morning is a joy."
For Buckley it has always made sense to stay in London, where the work is. He has bought a flat in the northwest of the city, owns a car, has "built a whole life". At the same time he acknowledges how different his experience of London is from that of people who had little choice but to work here in the 1950s. "London isn't dictating to me. I could up and leave tomorrow, and that does make a difference."
As for moving back to Ireland, he's philosophical. "We all like to think we're in control of where we'll be in 10 or 15 years' time, but we're not. All sorts of considerations come into play: health, family situation, kids. That said, as a film editor, when you reach a certain level you could live in Antartica. If they want you they'll come to you."
CLAUDE ASHMORE, DENTIST
"Every magazine you pick up now is full of people with straight white teeth. The days of the English and Irish with their mouthful of yellow teeth are numbered," says the 33-year-old, a dentist with Andrew Hull Associates, an English chain of upmarket practices specialising in restorative dentistry.
Ashmore, who was the only graduate from his class of 35 at Trinity College Dublin to move to London, has been increasingly drawn to the area of restorative and cosmetic dentistry, and not just because it's a lucrative business. "I like giving people their smile back. Often you see a transformation in people's confidence if they feel they can smile or eat properly for the first time in their life."
Moving to London was originally a bit of an adventure. "I felt I needed to be thrown out of the Celtic nest." Ironically, he quickly drew a large crowd of friends after him, most of who are still in London. "We've all ended up in or around Notting Hill. It's a fun place to be."
At the end of the summer he'll complete an MA in restorative dentistry at University College London, which has prompted thoughts of moving back to Ireland to set up a practice. "I guess I'm starting to think about getting married and having kids, and although London is fine if your kids are young, I'd prefer somewhere a bit greener."
Although his Hong Kong-born, English-educated girlfriend reckons she'll consider relocating if Ashmore agrees to cheer for England at a rugby international, Ashmore confesses he still has doubts. "I guess I'm used to living in a world city, with all its hustle and bustle. Even Dublin can't beat it on that front."
Should he chose to move back, he has no doubt there'll be a market in Ireland for his skills in cosmetic dentistry. "People aren't just looking for the local guy who works out of a surgery over the corner shop. They'll shop round, and they're looking for somewhere clean, open and slick, where the people clearly know what they're doing."