When growing up, an Irish family lived above the childhood home of Kuba Shand-Baptiste (32) in northwest London.
“Our families were super, super, super close, we used to just walk in and out of each other’s flats. When I moved to Ireland, I thought I’ve got Irish people that I consider family, so I know all the things and I’ve been to Irish funerals and all this stuff.”
However, Shand-Baptiste moved to Ireland the day before the Dublin riots in November 2023, and felt that she had a different reception to the one she had been expecting.
“It was a bit of a shock. What I was seeing play out was a lot of anger about immigration and hostility. It was quite worrying as well.”
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Shand-Baptiste had moved to Ireland to be with her partner, who also lives in Dublin. “I never really thought about moving to Ireland. I met my partner on Bumble in London in 2022, I didn’t realise he was on travel mode.” (The dating app Bumble lets its users change their location using travel mode, meaning they can look for matches with people in different locations.)
“The first time I visited him in Dublin, I had a really lovely time. I remember thinking that Dublin wasn’t what I thought it would be. I thought it would be a lot more rural. The town centre was quite overwhelming when I got there. I wasn’t used to the buses sort of doing their own thing – sometimes they just don’t show up.”
While Shand-Baptiste experienced a couple of revelations on her first trip to Ireland, she felt it was “very familiar. It just felt like, weirdly, a northern [British] town.”
The couple did long distance for about a year before Shand-Baptiste decided to move to Dublin.
“I realised that I could move as I work remotely, but that he couldn’t.” Shand-Baptiste is a journalist and author, while her partner works in IT.
London had also begun to lose some of its appeal for her. In 2020 she had moved to northwest London and felt that, as she was not living in central London any more, no one wanted to come and visit.
“I just thought, I’m in this relationship that is healthy and makes me happy, and I don’t normally do things like this. Normally I just cut things off before I give them a chance to get this far, but I thought, let me take a risk and see what it’s like, and if it all goes tits up then I’ll move back.”
[ ‘Sometimes weather wise you hardly even see your neighbours here in Ireland’Opens in new window ]
The couple were able to find a place to live together much faster than they thought they would, despite the housing crisis.
“I think it took about a month or so. I kind of just had to ready myself for the move a lot faster than I realised.”
Shand-Baptiste feels that racism in Ireland is more overt than it is in the UK.
“The second day I was here, someone called me a black bitch. I didn’t know what to say because it was so close to the riots and there were a lot of them. I’ve had people throw things at me.”
She noticed something strange would happen when she spoke back in her British accent to people who shouted racist abuse: “People were very sort of thrown off when I started to speak, which I thought was really weird. It opened my eyes to this privilege that I didn’t realise I had.”
For Shand-Baptiste, life in Dublin “almost felt like I had arrived at a different point in time? Not in terms of technology or anything.”
She felt her experiences might be “equivalent to 1980s London. [Immigrants] have been here for a bit and people are used to seeing them, but they’re not quite happy that you’re still here and that you now become part of the fabric.”
Her parents moved to London in the 1970s and 1980s – her mother was born in Jamaica, while her father was born in Leicester to Antiguan parents.
Shand-Baptiste noticed “how diverse” Dublin was on her trips here before moving over.
“Obviously there’s a growing global movement of people who are opposed to any semblance of immigration, so it makes sense that that’s sort of rising alongside housing inequity and other class issues – it’s a social crisis in general.
“It’s a shame. I think I had rose-tinted glasses on, given my experiences with my neighbours growing up.”
Dublin has a really good general energy. It’s easy to have a nice night out and get chatting with random people you might never have spoken to
However, Shand-Baptiste says that, in Ireland, outside of Dublin, “I haven’t felt that same sense of hostility. People have been very friendly and curious. There hasn’t been a sort of ‘What are you doing here?’ vibe”.
It took Shand-Baptiste some time to find her community in Ireland. “It’s quite hard to break into friendship groups, but people are really welcoming at the same time.
“I had to go back to Bumble to make friends. (The dating app Bumble has a spin-off app called Bumble for Friends)
“I ended up making friends with people who weren’t from Ireland, basically. People from Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Trinidad, like different places. I was introduced to one Irish friend through someone else, he’s a good friend now.”
Her partner moved from Nigeria to Ireland originally to study, but then decided to stay and work. He is currently on a work visa but is going to apply for Irish residency soon.
“That was a new experience. It opened my eyes in a lot of ways as I have a British passport, so there’s that reckoning with my own privilege as well. I can go anywhere, I can just come here and live here – he can’t.”
Shand-Baptiste loves how, wherever you are in Dublin, you are close to nature: “There’s so many times when I’m on public transport and I’m like, ‘Wow look over there, there’s a mountain’. This is a really beautiful place.
“Dublin has a really good general energy. It’s easy to have a nice night out and get chatting with random people you might never have spoken to. The other thing I love about Dublin is the food. I’ve had way more positive eating experiences here in the past few years than in London.”
Would she recommend Dublin as somewhere to live?
“It depends. It’s not too different, but different enough that it’s not stale. It’s exciting, and you can discover a lot of new things. The only thing I’d say is beware of the weather.”
Kuba Shand-Baptiste’s debut novel Soon Come, published by Dialogue Books, is out September 25th
We would like to hear from people who have moved to Ireland in the past 10 years. To get involved, email newtotheparish@irishtimes.com or tweet @newtotheparish
