THE NEWS THAT one of the world’s biggest employers, Amazon, is soon to enforce an end to hybrid and remote working arrangements will be met with unease by many Irish workers who have organised their lives around the new normal.
This novel way of working has been with us now for about four-and-a-half years, which actually makes it not very novel at all. That is, hypothetically, long enough for someone to have had a baby who is now going to school. It is also long enough for someone to have met and settled down with a partner while navigating the geographic challenges that often come hand-in-hand with a dual-career relationship.
These are a prelude to some of the many ways people rearranged their lives to try and move on when everything was at such a standstill. We can’t erase those years, and to try and pretend we didn’t learn what we did from that time – both technologically and socially – would be akin to pushing a genie back inside a bottle.
With its vast influence, Amazon’s decision to return all its workforce to the office should also be sounding alarm bells in towns and villages across Ireland. When remote work became an option in 2020, many people returned to their hometowns or relocated to places that better suited their lifestyle.
I should know. I was one of them.
At the dawn of the pandemic, I was living in a house-share in Dublin and travelling to Limerick at any available opportunity. I had left a partner and a life behind when I pursued my career to the capital, so when work went hybrid, I gave up my room and made the decision to move home. After nearly three more years of hybrid work, which involved hundreds of exhausting trips on the motorway at all hours of the day and night, I realised the situation wasn’t sustainable – not least when the person working the graveyard shift at the toll recognised me from evenings before.
That lifestyle was also extremely expensive. When the restrictions in place since Covid-19 started to fall away, I found myself spending more on fuel than I had on rent when I lived in Dublin. I worried about my carbon footprint from all that driving (my unusual working hours made public transport impossible) and on more than one occasion, I had to call family for help when I had car trouble and became stranded during the night far from home.
The arguments for why someone might want to work out of a major city but live elsewhere are, often, abundant. Parts of the hospitality sector reported that remote work damaged cafes and restaurants that operate in the orbit of large employers. Others say if you choose to work somewhere, you should be willing to live there, or ‘Dublin wages for Dublin work’.
This discourse fails to recognise the potential that a partially remote workforce could have for balanced regional development. When people live in a place, they spend their hard-earned cash in the local shops, restaurants and bars, they send their children to the local schools and they sometimes set up new businesses of their own. Purchase prices for homes may be lower outside Dublin, but in the country’s other cities, the same scarcity is driving the cost of living into similar territory. In the Mid-West, house prices rose 13.4% in the 12 months to July compared to 10.3% in Dublin in the same period, according to the latest figures from the CSO.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy drew from the dictionary of corporate mumbo jumbo when he cited a desire to “strengthen our culture”, but it is true that there are cultural downsides to remote work. There is so much for early career employees to learn from their more experienced peers that sometimes doesn’t translate over Slack and Zoom, and the social aspect of work can take a hit when teams are spread across an entire country.
In the meantime, rural Ireland has now lived through several generations that have seen too many of its children leave for work or college and never return. When I worked remotely from my parents’ home parish in north Mayo, a neighbour conveyed the news that a young man from Dublin had moved in nearby. He had no local connections but liked outdoor pursuits, and crucially, could now work remotely.
This tiny, remote townland, which had seen no inward migration for decades and suffered a severe dearth of young people, had a new transplant.
It’s hard to quantify just how common an occurrence this has been since the advent of mainstream remote working. In 2023, the National Remote Work Survey by the Western Development Commission and the University of Galway showed that almost 14% of the nearly 6,000 respondents had upped sticks since remote and hybrid work was introduced – most of whom had left Dublin. In that same survey, 92% of respondents indicated that the situation around remote or hybrid working would be a key factor in their decision to change jobs.
Outside of the potential economic and social opportunity for the regions, there could also be a benefit for Dublin. Competition for housing, schools, GPs and more is as fierce as ever in the capital, and the return of people who would rather not will only serve to exacerbate the situation. If national and local authorities are serious about drawing in digital nomads, they will need to boost such services beyond the Pale; the most overcrowded hospitals in Ireland are in the west and south.
With so many people in their 20s and 30s leaving Ireland altogether, it’s all too easy to wonder about the greener grass that might await after the departures hall at Dublin Airport.
The dither and delay by employers on how to proceed more than four years after workers put down roots in their new lives – and the ineffective ‘right to request’ remote work introduced by the government – may have only served to pour more fuel on those daydreams about Bondi Beach.
But there is another way. Huge demand exists for jobs that incorporate hybrid and remote working, and it’s within the power of the government to create meaningful guidelines and targets to encourage activity outside our overburdened capital city.
Hybrid and remote workers across the country will be hoping their local representatives advocate for such moves before they have to uproot their lives once again for an old, new normal.
Maria Flannery is a journalist and writer from Limerick.
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