American Nick Howley (41) came to live in Limerick in October 2024, a month after his husband Brendan Roddy (45), a secondary-school art teacher and ceramicist who is also from the US, moved to the city to study, on a Master of Fine Arts programme at Limerick School of Art and Design.
The couple, who moved from southern Maine, initially planned to move to Limerick for a year while Roddy studied and Howley completed a special project for his American employer, which had just acquired a Dublin-based language ed-tech company.
When Howley’s company then offered him a permanent role in Ireland, “we kind of jumped at it,” he says.
The couple first visited Ireland on their honeymoon in 2017, attracted in part by the fact that Roddy has Irish heritage through his great-grandparents. Since then, they had returned for holidays every year, except during the Covid pandemic.
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“It was a slow build-up. I think part of it was fuelled by [the idea that] it could be a better financial choice, part of it was fuelled by the [US] is getting a little bit scary, and then part of it was fuelled by the fact we loved the idea of living in Ireland or in other countries that we have visited – so it’s multifaceted.”
Howley describes “a palpable shift” in Washington DC, where he and Roddy lived before moving to Maine, after Donald Trump was first elected US president in 2016.
“You could feel this change occurring,” Howley says. “And for us [the move to Limerick] wasn’t down to the fact that [the Trump] administration took over; we were already here. We had been planning during the Biden administration to be here for my husband to go to graduate school, so it wasn’t necessarily fuelled to come here by politics, but I think part of the reason we’re staying is because of politics.
“We’re watching a case get worked up to the US supreme court that would reverse our marriage at the federal level, which is really scary.
“We got engaged the day before the supreme court decision came down in 2015 [establishing marriage equality nationwide in the US] and then we got married a year later, and we are one of the lucky ones where our marriage has always been recognised at both the state and the federal level. And now to watch a case get worked up that could reverse that for us and so many of our friends, it’s scary to watch.
“And then you turn on the news in general and watch what’s happening in the United States and it should give people pause. It should scare people to watch what’s occurring: their reversal of Roe V Wade, like there are so many things.”
The “rental situation” was the impetus for the couple to look for an alternative place to live, Howley says, as they are currently paying €3,000 a month to rent a new-build two-bedroom apartment in Limerick.
It was when Howley accidentally selected the “buy” rather than the “rent” tab on a property listings website that he started to wonder if the couple would be able to buy a home rather than continue to rent.
They had the proceeds from the sale of their house in Maine and Howley, who is now on a critical skills visa, was able to apply for a mortgage.
“In buying a house, we are going to pay less than half our rent on a mortgage,” says Howley. “Once we had the approval-in-principle letter, we were able to start looking in earnest, so we got into a few bidding wars and got to experience the joy of the Irish bidding war.
“I watched an apartment go from €245,000 to €297,000 in the matter of four minutes. That was kind of the craziest thing I’ve ever seen, ever, having bought and sold real estate previously.”
Howley, who has documented the ups and downs of the couple’s experience on TikTok (@wayfaringandwhiskey), adds: “Things just move so much faster and binding contracts are signed so much earlier in the process in the US.
“[And] the idea of ‘gazumping’ is totally new to us – that someone could just swoop in and grab the property out from under us weeks or months into the process is wild.”
Twenty days after obtaining their approval in principle Howley and Roddy went “sale agreed” on a three-bed semidetached home in the suburb of Corbally; they are hoping for the sale to close as planned this month.
In terms of house prices in the US versus Ireland, Howley describes it as “the same [level of] crazy.”
“We sold our home [in Maine] for a profit that I don’t think we should have been able to get for that house, but that’s how the market worked. The same thing’s happening here in Ireland; people are selling houses for profits they shouldn’t be able to get for the houses they’re selling.”
The couple are eager to move into their new home and make it their own and they also plan to turn a shed in the back garden into a ceramics studio for Roddy.
Right now we don’t really feel like it’s a safe place for our daughter to be and that’s just the bottom line
— Kim Mathis
“Once we are both on a Stamp 4 [citizenship by naturalisation] residency, it is my husband’s intention to open some type of ceramic business in the area,” says Howley.
The Central Statistics Office migration estimates made headlines this summer as they showed a 96 per cent jump in the number of people moving from the US to Ireland between April 2024 and April 2025. That represented a total of 9,600 people, up from 4,900 in the preceding 12 months.
There is no available breakdown on the reasons why people have moved, so it is likely some have come for a set period of time, for education or for work projects, while others may be returning Irish expats.
Nevertheless, some are laying down roots by buying homes, as noted by south-Dublin-based estate agent Vinnie Finnegan.
“The main pull that we would see for coming to Ireland would be safety, education, general community – and recreation seems to be more accessible here as well. I know the Irish schools are also a big draw,” Finnegan says. “Most of the people we’re meeting, they already have some sort of a tie to Ireland, so in most cases one might have an Irish passport and the kids would have dual-citizenship.”
Kim Mathis (61) and Richard Reep (65), a former preschool art teacher and an architect, moved to Dublin from Orlando, Florida, in June to join their 22-year-old daughter who is in Ireland on a student visa, pursuing a bachelor’s degree at University College Dublin.
In US terms, “they are a little young for retirement” but they realised a retirement visa was their best option to move to Ireland, says Mathis.
“We have a transgender daughter and that was one of the things as to why we really felt like we needed to make that move. She had expressed before, long before the [second] election [of Trump], some interest in maybe going to school here … so she was kind of a catalyst.
“We’re encouraging her to stay and do an advanced degree if she can. She doesn’t know yet what she wants to do, but we want her to put some time in between what’s going on [in the US] now and her future.” Mathis pauses before adding: “Because right now we don’t really feel like it’s a safe place for her to be and that’s just the bottom line.”
“Florida is a permitless carry state. So any fool can go look at a gun and ‘open carry’ [such a weapon] anywhere at any time. So, the United States in general, but Florida specifically, just feels really unsafe for us.”
Even before their daughter decided to study here, Mathis was deep into researching a potential move for the couple to spend their “golden years” in Europe, prompted by a 15-day tour they took of seven countries (not including Ireland) in 2022.
“We actually looked at France but the language barrier was really a big deterrent because it’s one thing to travel in a country, but it’s a whole different ball game when you’re trying to live and work and buy a house, for example, in a country with a language that you don’t speak.” Ireland, she says, “just kept coming up”.
“And [my mother] brought a great deal of Irish heritage and culture to our family when I was little, so it felt like a good fit,” adds Reep, who had three Irish grandparents.
When their search zoned in on Ireland, Reep started to compare Orlando and Dublin and found “we’re in a brief period when the cost of living in Orlando and Dublin is pretty close to one-to-one. That tells you how expensive [it is] and the inflation that America is being subjected to right now.”
I don’t want anybody to be scare-mongered into thinking the Americans are coming to take over. They’re not
Nonetheless, they still had “a little bit of sticker shock” when it came to how expensive homes were in Dublin in particular. Were it not for their daughter being at university in the capital, they say they might have been more open to looking for homes in the southeast.
The couple have gone sale agreed on a three-bedroom mews home in Dundrum and are hoping for the sale to close as soon as possible. They are planning to buy in cash using the proceeds from the home they sold in Orlando.
Even with the premium on homes in south Dublin, Mathis and Reep say other factors made the move the right decision for them.
Referring to the accessibility of public transport, Reep says: “Housing prices are very expensive, but you save if you don’t have to operate a car. Insurance here is drastically cheaper, so a lot of things work out better.”
Mathis talks about there being “an insurance crisis” in Florida due to the number of weather events. “You know, the hurricane season.And so many of the insurance providers have pulled out, so insurance premiums are skyrocketing.
“So when you say, ‘Well you’re buying a house that’s X,Y,Z,’ but we’re not paying several thousand – I mean, thousands of dollars – to insure a home. Some people are looking $10,000, $12,000 now [to insure] a middle-class family home.”
Liz O’Kane, who has been a buyers’ agent since 2002, says: “My clients are primarily the Irish trying to return, or right now it is Americans trying to get a foothold into Ireland, who have connections with Ireland.”
“They’re coming and they are safeguarding their future, really. And they’re worried; they’re worried about the political climate in the States and they’re like, ‘We’re not staying [in the US]’,” she says.
“And the interesting thing is because our transaction process is so inefficient and so slow, you have Americans who land in Ireland on a Monday and think that they’re going to property sale agreed by Friday. That’s not going to happen. They cannot understand that we have sales and marketing campaigns that can go on for anything between three to six weeks and that the bidding process is highly competitive.”
In terms of the property market, prospective buyers from the US “are around all right, but not in thousands”, says O’Kane.
“I don’t want anybody to be scare-mongered into thinking the Americans are coming to take over. They’re not.”
His own dad hailing from Portlaoise, moving to Ireland for a period of time with his wife Olivia and their three children, Sunday (15), Finbarr (13) and Adelaide (11), was something Brian Kelly (51) had always wanted to do.
Brian’s father, Tom, was the first in his family to go to university. He studied at UCD in the 1960s before being recruited by General Electric and moving to the US, where he met Brian’s mother, Mary Beth, in Pennsylvania. They later moved to Arizona where Brian was born.
Previously tied to the US because of work, Brian and Olivia started planning a move to Ireland after Brian stepped down from his role as president of a veterinary company in 2023.
Brian and the couple’s children have Irish citizenship and Olivia, who worked in the US as a preventive health consultant, has a Stamp 4 visa as his spouse. Having focused on settling the family into life in Dublin since they moved, Olivia is now setting her sights on figuring out the job market in her field, while Brian serves on the boards of five companies.
In August of last year, the Kellys moved from the California beach town of Santa Monica and engaged O’Kane as their buyers’ agent to find them suitable potential homes to buy as they were struggling to find a long-term rental for a family of five.
As an Irish citizen, Brian would be able to take out a mortgage, but as he currently has equity in the companies for which he is a board member rather than a salary, that was not an option, so they took out a loan from a US bank for the home, he says. The family ended up buying an extended period home on a sought-after road in Glenageary.
The quality of life here is so great for us and for the kids. They have so much freedom
— Olivia Kelly
“Everyone said ‘the housing market’s really tough in Dublin’,” says Olivia. “And in Los Angeles, especially where we lived, the housing market is very tight and competitive so we were like, ‘Oh, we’re used to that’, but they were right. It’s actually an even tighter market here and even more difficult to find something than we were used to.”
Brian says he was keen to enrol their children in an Irish-curriculum school but the family opted for the Nord Anglia International School, having been placed on waiting lists at all but one of the seven or eight other schools to which they had applied.
“The one thing I had in my head before we came, which proved not to be practical, was I thought our kids could play GAA, but it’s really hard at their age to start, if you don’t know anything about Gaelic football or hurling and you’re a teenager, so you kind of can’t do it,” Brian says.
The couple say they are not entirely sure how long they will stay in Ireland.
“I think the family part is the biggest challenge, because we do miss them, the kids miss them and we don’t get to see them very often. So I think, you know, those strings are pulled a bit,” says Olivia.
“[But] the quality of life here is so great for us and for the kids. They have so much freedom, being able to take public transit with their friends and go off and do things on their own, which would not be as possible in LA.”
