Within only a couple of months of deciding to return home to Ireland after 20 years in Germany, Shane Mulcahy had secured a position as mechanical application engineer with Fort Wayne Metals in Castlebar, Co Mayo.
His experience illustrates how making the move home can be easier than people might think, from a work perspective at least.
While doing a diploma in mechanical engineering at Institute of Technology, Tallaght, Mulcahy spent a year at the Fraunhofer Institute in Braunschweig as part of the Erasmus programme. He was offered a full-time laboratory technician position there in 1998, focusing on developing diamond-coated products.
Two years into the role, Mulcahy went to Coventry University in the UK to study for a year, which gave him a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. “My former boss from the Fraunhofer Institute came to see me in Coventry and said he was going to start his own diamond-related business,” he said. “He was looking for a production manager and asked would I be interested.”
Mulcahy took on the role at the new company, Condias GmbH in Itzehoe, near Hamburg in 2001. He was responsible for setting up production from scratch and stayed there for 15 years. He met his wife four years ago and they now have a one-year old daughter. “We were living in an apartment in Hamburg and felt we would like our daughter to grow up in the countryside as we both had,” he said. “So I got in touch with some of my old professors in IT Tallaght, as well as family members and recruitment companies, to see what was available.”
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Fort Wayne Metals produces raw materials for wire-based medical devices such as stents. A fluent German speaker, Mulcahy will be working with the company’s German customers on projects when he starts next month.
He won’t be the only new recruit either. Fort Wayne Metals has already created 20 new jobs this year in Castlebar, with at least another 40 planned over the next five years.
“We have hired a number of people recently who have come home from abroad to work,” said Anthony McHale, its training and development manager. “There is definitely the feeling on the ground in places like Australia and Canada that there are great opportunities available here in Ireland.”
Dedicated campaigns have been launched recently to highlight these opportunities to emigrants visiting their families over the Christmas period. For example, recruitment and HR services group Collins McNicholas is holding a recruitment day aimed at this group in four locations across Ireland on December 29 as part of its Home for Work campaign.
Collins McNicholas will be recruiting for a range of roles including science professionals, engineers, accountants, IT specialists and human resource professionals as well as for administration, sales and marketing positions.
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The events will take place from 10am to 1pm at the Glasshouse Hotel in Sligo; the Harbour Hotel in Galway, the Maryborough Hotel in Cork, and the Sheraton Hotel in Athlone.
There are about 20 companies involved in the recruitment day looking to hire a total of 1,000 people across the country. Some of these are multinationals, but SMEs are also in the mix, which Michelle Murphy, director of Collins McNicholas, said is a positive sign for the recruitment market generally. “Typically multinationals have a constant need for new people, although not always in high volumes. For SMEs, hiring new staff is a calculated decision made around the boardroom table. The fact that indigenous companies are looking to take on people again is a sure sign that things are moving in the right direction,” she said.
Maeve McElwee, director of employee relations at Ibec, says it is a “reasonably positive” time overall in terms of job opportunities and conditions for people thinking of moving back to Ireland.
According to Ibec’s latest HR Update, 71% of companies plan to increase basic pay in 2017 with the average pay increase set to be 2%, similar to the past three years.
Ibec cautioned that a significant number of companies still can’t afford pay rises but said that, due to record low inflation, the economy as a whole is going through a period of strong real wage growth.
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“Unemployment is likely to reach 8% by the end of the year and 42% of employers surveyed as part of the latest Ibec HR Update plan to increase employee numbers next year,” said McElwee. “Considerable skills shortages are beginning to emerge, which means good opportunities for jobseekers.”
A high percentage of the HR managers surveyed in the HR Update still rate Ireland positively as a place to work. “This is due to the drive towards high-quality knowledge-based work, the excellent education system and good quality of life,” said McElwee. “There are challenges on the living front, which people would have to weigh up along with the tax implications of moving to Ireland.”
This is exactly what Fiona Collery and her husband, David, did before deciding to move back to Ireland recently. Forced to emigrate during the downturn, they moved to Kent in the UK in 2009 with the intention of staying two years.
Before they knew it they were there five years, said Fiona, and when they had their son Sean in April 2015 decided they wanted to realise their dream to come home.
David is now working as a lecturer in Galway Mayo Institute of Technology and Fiona is payroll manager for Collins McNicholas in her home town of Sligo.
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“I had been working as a financial accountant in Kent and went to Collins McNicholas to see what was available. They came back to me quite quickly to say they had an internal job if I was interested in that,” she said.
“Things have changed since we left Ireland. The salaries are not as high as in the UK and the Universal Social Charge and property taxes have been introduced. But the real difference is the family support, the quality of life and the non-existent traffic [in Sligo]. You couldn’t buy those things.”