When Covid-19 lockdowns cut short his Erasmus experience, Eoin Blunnie was left with a wanderlust that has since led the Bray native to his new life in Amsterdam.
The Trinity College Dublin music and English graduate has converted a passion for video gaming into a career in e-sports marketing but says it was “fate that made me leave Ireland. I felt like a victim of circumstance.”
“I went on a six-month Erasmus to the UK in early 2020. It was one of the best parts of my life. Genuinely, it was such a thrill to be living by myself in a foreign country for the first time, but then, five weeks later – as you might remember – Covid happened and I had to go home.”
Blunnie says his last year and a half in “Covid College” was a “horrific experience”. The lack of in-person interaction led him to look for a change of scene when he graduated.
Graduating from Trinity with a “famously employable degree”, he began to apply for jobs while working in retail and continuing to work part-time as a freelance orchestral music composer as he had done during college.
“I was freelancing online for the best part of four years,” he says, leading to the “really exciting experience” of composing the theme for Entre Fronteras, a Mexican series about emigration.
Just months later, he was on the move himself, moving to Brussels to take up a job as a communications intern at the European Parliament for five months. “It was my first real office job, so it was a baptism of fire for sure.”
Blunnie had built up experience managing social media accounts for student societies and e-sports competitions while at Trinity.
An avid gamer, he had got involved in Ireland’s competitive gaming scene with the Irish Collegiate E-sports series – an amateur competition for third-level students which, he says, has been a platform for many Irish e-sports careers.
Managing the social media and digital marketing for the competition led to him getting work for a US-based team, the Pittsburgh Knights, which he continued alongside his internship.
“There were some days where I would go into the office, do my nine-to-five and then come home and work from 11pm to 4am for [the Pittsburgh Knights], as their events were on US time. I don’t know how I did it, in hindsight.”
Eventually he had to give up the e-sports work “because that was not a sustainable schedule”.
Reaching the end of the internship, he was again on the lookout for work, hoping to find full-time employment in e-sports, his passion. South Korean company Krafton, the publisher of one of the biggest brands in e-sports, PUBG: Battlegrounds, offered him a role in Amsterdam.
He has now been working for three years as an e-sports marketing co-ordinator, and says the “vibes are great” in the company. “It’s a dream come true. To be working with the company responsible for a game you have spent a lot of time playing, that all of your friends have heard of, is really cool.”
Blunnie, now 26, says there are “only a handful of e-sports jobs in Dublin” with far more opportunities in Amsterdam. “The publishers tend to be in the Nordics, Germany or the Netherlands.”
Another big benefit of the job is the city he lives in, which, he says, is “ideal” for a nondriver. “Compared to Dublin, it is a whole lot easier to get around. It has a similar population size to Dublin but it is half the size and you can cycle everywhere.”
He describes Dutch public transport as “exponentially better than Dublin’s” and notes that Amsterdam has “so many more things to do than just going to the pub for a few pints”.
Blunnie has recently started a subscription that allows him to visit any of the arthouse cinemas in Amsterdam as often as he would like.
He has recently got into bouldering – climbing a rock wall. “You can count on your hands the number of bouldering gyms in Dublin but here there are nearly endless possibilities right at your fingertips.”
It isn’t all rosy, however. Amsterdam, he acknowledged, “has one of the worst housing crises in Europe but by the same token, Dublin does as well”.
“It doesn’t feel any more expensive than Dublin. If anything the rent is possibly a little bit cheaper here, but they are similar. But, for the same value, you get a much better quality of life here.”
For young people, he says the “big difference” between the two cities is “that you can stay out late in most pubs in the city centre” before getting readily available public transport home.
Blunnie can see himself moving back to Ireland at some point. He misses his family and many of his friends in Ireland. “But I have been here for a while and have built a network here. Whatever I decide, I am going to be missing out on seeing some people.”
