SYDNEY LETTER/PADRAIG COLLINS: One weekend last December, five of us went from Dublin to Glasgow for a stag party. The groom liked it so much he moved there within weeks. Another moved to France shortly after and I am now in Sydney. Both of our number that remain in Dublin are looking to leave.
If this seems unusual, you have not been talking to enough people in their late 20s-early 30s. Before we left, almost all our friends said they would leave too if the right opportunity came along. Since we got to Australia, two more friends have decided to leave Dublin.
So why are we leaving? The simple answer is that we are all sick and tired of Dublin. Sick of working hard, earning a good salary and still not being able to afford a house in Dublin.
Tired of the fact that the capital has become one big traffic jam. We've had enough of ignorant, rude service in shops and restaurants, of being ripped off too often in pubs and shops.
(Is anyone remotely surprised that the Government did absolutely nothing to prevent post-euro profiteering?)
Everyone has more personal reasons too, of course. In our case, my partner, who is Australian, had just had enough after almost six years in Dublin. She had seen the city change for the worse in that time. We were also concerned about the kind of place our one-year- old daughter was going to grow up in. If renting a one-bedroom flat was all we could afford, were we doing the best we could for her?
It's not that as an Irish Times journalist I was badly paid. It's just that the rampant surge of euroflation, together with naked greed and profiteering, caught some of us unawares.
With only one income coming in since our daughter was born, we just could not afford a house in Dublin unless we moved so far out west that I would almost never make it home in time to bath her and put her to bed. What kind of existence is that? Not one that I want anyway.
You work hard, get a good job and decent money because of it, but what does it amount to if you have to spend 15 hours a week going to and from work.
In this regard we are not a whole lot better off in Sydney. The median house price in one out of every two Sydney neighbourhoods is now $500,000 (€285,000).
We will end up spending as much and more as we could afford in Dublin. The one major plus factor is that you get what you pay for. You pay a lot of money, you get to live in a nice area where you don't need to fear walking after dark. Spending a lot of money in Dublin offers no such guarantee.
Eating out in an average restaurant should not be a luxury. In Dublin, that is what it had become to us.
At even the most innocuous-looking place in Dublin, we had to check the prices and weigh up, as we often did, how many nappies could be bought for the exorbitant amount a meal was going to cost. We do not have to do that here. We can afford it.
A couple of weeks before we left, I paid €4.85 for a pint of Guinness in a city centre bar in Dublin. It was extortionate, but not surprising. Before going into that bar, my friends and I had declined to go into a nearby premises after being given the third degree from an aggressive bouncer.
He put his hand up and barked questions about where we had been and how much we had had to drink. The cinema and a large coke were the answers, but I just said I didn't care for his attitude and that we'd go elsewhere. When we were a reasonable distance away I also shouted something unkind, but accurate and heartfelt, at him.
It was a Tuesday night. There were only marginally more customers in the bar than goons on the door. My friends and I would not represent a classic case of threat to the social order. But our custom was apparently not desirable.
Even when you do get into a Dublin pub or shop or any place where service is required, the staff are almost invariably snide and treat your custom as some sort of interruption in their day. They are clock-watchers who never say please or thanks and who are employed by people who couldn't be bothered informing their staff that being nice to customers means they will be nice to you.
And why should they? We still shop there because life has become so fast in Dublin. We don't have time to take our business elsewhere and we know that even if we did, they would be just as rude in the other shop.
People in the same jobs in Sydney seem to be doing it because they like it and not because they are waiting for the world to offer them a dream job elsewhere. And even if it is a staging post on the way to better things, they don't use that as an excuse to be nasty to customers. They recognise that that job pays their rent, university fees, whatever and that being good at it is the way to hang onto it.
I won't surprise anyone with my view that Dublin is one of the filthiest cities in the world. A week before leaving, I was walking into the city centre when I saw a teenage girl throw a chocolate bar wrapper on to the ground. I asked her why she didn't put it into a bin. She told me to "f*** off". Her equally fragrant mother told me that she should throw it on my "f***in' head".
Sydney is not paradise by any means. Not all is better here. The nappies are crap, for instance. You can't get Pampers for love nor money. (Note to all those potential visitors whom I asked to bring Tayto out to us - bring Pampers instead.)
Despite what I said above, I also miss the pubs, or at least the choice of going to one. In the Sydney suburb we live in there is no pub. Not one. There is a Masonic club, which has a bar. The next suburb over has a forme army club, which also has a bar. But the former frowns on Catholics and the latter, to my personal experience at another branch, has a problem with Irish people. Neither will get any custom from me.
The vast middle classes are the engine that drives any modern economy, such as Ireland's, but if our capital city cannot provide affordable, decent accommodation and a reasonable standard of living for us, there are plenty of other cities around the world which will.
The flight from Dublin may be a mere trickle at the moment, but the Government had better watch out lest it become a stream.