Downtown Miami is 4,000 miles from where Geoff and Jean Lee now live. Their tidy new home is perched on the edge of a frigid County Kerry lake beneath a gorse-flecked mountain. The sticky heat of Florida seems a different world. They have left behind the urban helter-skelter of Donald Trump’s Florida fiction factory, and exchanged it for the gentle discourse of agricultural Ireland.
Geoff is a musician and artist, and he jokes that they represent “the first wave of climate refugees” from America. The crushing humidity of Florida can be hard to withstand – but the political heat can be even worse.
“There are only five million people in Ireland,” says Geoff. “Back in the States there are 75 million people we disagree with.”
“Trump’s just made such a gash in US politics,” says Jean, a retired landscape architect who was born in Dublin to American parents. That made her eligible for an Irish passport. The couple moved in down the road from us in 2022.
Geoff’s guitar playing, on handsome instruments he makes himself, has made him immediately welcome in local Friday night music sessions. Last summer, we watched him play in an evening of music and recitals that included the poetry of the Kerry laureate Paddy Bushe. Not bad going for a blow-in.
And they are, as they say, the first wave.
A few days ago, Pauline Sugrue, our delightful neighbourhood auctioneer (the term for “estate agent” in Ireland and so much more of an honest description, in my view) was explaining why the local housing market was so strong.
“We are getting a lot of Americans looking for homes. Not just holiday homes, but places to come and live,” she said.
This is not just a novelty, but a full-on reversal of the traditional direction of travel. Across the past 200 years, around 4.6 million Irish people have emigrated to the US (that figure does not include many other countries). The estimate for total movement of people from Ireland in that time is 9-10 million. The population of the whole island today, in all 32 counties including the North, is 7.2 million.
So, what explains the reverse flow to the south-west of Ireland? Pauline says the majority of her stateside buyers are people with Irish parents or grandparents or other direct claims on the green passport. It is no easier for Americans without those links to move here than people from any other non-EU state (except for us Brits, who are covered by a 1923 agreement now called the Common Travel Area, which also allows Irish people to live, work and enjoy the benefits of the UK).
For today’s American immigrants, like the Lees, the reasons for moving are varied, but…
“Politics is a lot of it in the last while,” says Pauline. “Politics on both sides. A lot of people we see from there say that politics in America has become too polarised.”
Pauline adds: “Ours is a very stable country and a lot of people, not just Americans, but French and Germans, seem to be looking for that as well. They like our communities, our countryside, the fact that they know their neighbours.
“A lot of people who are buying homes here talk about the crime levels where they live. Well, there is not much crime around these parts.”
And the weather? Of course, the weather.
It would be fair to say that few people complain about the heat here in the west of Ireland, though on those rare days that the temperature nudges into the 80s (say 28C for any young people reading), it may set off orderly panic-buying of electric fans among long-term residents. And let’s just say that drought is unlikely ever to be an issue in the kingdom of Kerry.
And so, the huddled masses of the US, alarmed at what their marmalade-faced and possibly lifetime president will do next, are beginning to move. Over here, in Kerry, the Lees and their fellow Americans are calling: “Come on in, the water’s lovely. Damn cold – but lovely.”
Ben Fenton is author of To Be Fair: The Ultimate Guide to Fairness in the 21st Century
