Catch 22 of getting a job

New Neighbours: Hana Václavová from Slovakia.

I get up about 8am most mornings and the first thing I do is take Shadow, my Great Dane, out for a walk. She has arthritis, so sometimes it is a battle, she doesn't always want to go out. I brought her over from home, from Bratislava. I've been in Dublin almost a year now, but Shadow only arrived recently, so now my Slovak boyfriend and myself are looking for somewhere new to live, near a park. I share a house in Dublin city centre with two Irish people, one British person, a Spaniard and an Italian. And Shadow. She takes a lot of feeding - it is like having another person to feed!

I work in the Amnesty Café on Fleet Street, and I've worked there the whole time I've been here. There are lots of us foreigners working there: me, and Italians, Spanish, Polish, German, as well as two Irish.

At home, I worked as an accountant for seven years; for a French company for three years and then for an NGO for four years. But I couldn't get that kind of job in Ireland. I went to agencies, and to Fás, but they told me I needed experience working in Ireland first. How do you get experience if nobody will employ you?

I work in the Amnesty café five or six days a week, either on the 9am-3pm shift, or the noon to 7pm one. They are very nice people to work with here, and it is a lovely place, but I would like to do a different job sometime in the future: I am getting tired here. I find it hard to keep smiling at the customers. Sometimes, I want to kill them, not smile at them!

At home in Bratislava, I have one sister, Elena, and my parents. I didn't know much about Ireland before I came here, but I read a lot in the papers at the time Slovakia joined the EU. I looked at lots of statistics that compared Ireland and Slovakia - the size of the two countries, the size of their population, and the different incomes.

I came here because in Slovakia it is quite difficult to find a job that is well-paid, especially outside Bratislava. You can buy a house cheaply in the countryside, but you won't be able to get a job to enable you to live there. There are more opportunities here. Ireland is not so expensive - except for mortgages and cars. Who can afford to pay those?

Most of the Slovakian people I know in Ireland are here to save money to buy a house or an apartment back home. Not many of them plan on staying here.

Irish people are definitely more tolerant than Slovaks. That is the biggest cultural difference I have noticed. In our country, people consider themselves very open-minded, but they are not; they even dress very conservatively and all look the same. They boss you all the time, and think they have the right to tell you what to do with everything in your life. I am not a typical Slovak, I don't think!

People in Ireland treat you like you can take care of yourself, they don't interfere. If I was walking down the street in Slovakia with my dog, for instance, people would be all the time telling me what to do with her, or to keep her away from them, or giving me a lecture. Here, nobody takes any notice at all: I am trusted to look after her myself.

When I am not working, I go to the gym. Or read. I read a lot. And I live in a house with a lot of people where it is always a party, so I can choose to enjoy it in the evenings or to be quiet at times. I haven't been out of Dublin yet; I've been working most of the time since I arrived.

The public transport here in Dublin is horrible. In a year, I have not once found a timetable to tell me when buses depart. I even tried looking on the Internet. I could find nothing. It is very frustrating. As for the health system! My boyfriend had an injury with his leg, a torn ligament, and we went to St James Hospital. We were waiting there four hours in A and E. We left and next day went to see a doctor privately. In Bratislava, we would never be waiting in emergency for more than 30 minutes, and even by then, we would have started complaining.

I don't meet so many Slovak people here: I don't really want to. If I had wanted to meet them, I would have stayed in Slovakia. My friends in Dublin are mainly Spanish, Italian and Irish. But I know there is a place where the Czech and Slovaks go to meet up with each other: they go to the Living Room pub off O'Connell Street, and there are Czech discos at the same venue.

My sister Elena is also coming to Ireland, to look for a job. I plan on staying here for some years. I don't have anything to go back to in Slovakia, and I don't miss anything about it - apart from the bread. I really miss that.

In conversation with Rosita Boland