THOUGH there exists a phrase ‘sound as a pound’, there is, mystifyingly, not an equivalent for the Euro.
And in recent weeks, the Euro’s radiance has been less than sterling.
With the Euro now touching a fresh nine-year low against the dollar, Goldman Sachs has predicted Euro-dollar parity by 2017, and for the pound to continue to strengthen against it.
A currency fry-up with Greece at the bottom
One reason is the possibility of a Greek exit, or Grexit, following snap elections there on January 25 in which the anti-austerity Syriza party currently leads.
Another is talk of quantitative easing by European Central Bank president Mario Draghi and market suspicion of a major bond-buying programme in the offing.
Good for exports. In beef, for example, Ireland’s farmers increasingly underprice Britain’s — whose breeding herd and domestic supplies are contracting — and the American market this week reopened to Irish cattle farmers after 15 years.
Your buying power is Dublin
Good, also, for the buying power back home of Irish people who have been accumulating sterling savings.
Gráinne Mellon, a barrister and co-chair of the London Irish Lawyers Association, says: “I did most of my Christmas shopping in Dublin instead of London this year.
“I prefer to shop in Ireland if I can at Christmas, but for the last few years, the price difference was notable.
“This Christmas it was more, even, and I was able to enjoy shopping in great Dublin shops like Hodges Figgis, Kilkenny and the Patrick Donald photography gallery.”
Now comparatively wealthier, many Irish people in Britain are also better placed to assist friends and relatives still living in Ireland.
“After Christmas, people get stuck for cash. When friends ask to borrow Euros, it is easier to lend now the Euro is worth less,” says Dr Shelley Deane, director of London-based Brehon Advisory and originally from Longford.
“Not worthless, but worth less!” she adds, laughing.
Also helping family back home is Katrina Ryan, originally from Inishowen and now living in Nottingham.
“It’s hard for my parents whilst visiting,” she says. “They’ve not had jobs for three years — they are aged 64 and 63. We pretty much have to fund everything for the two weeks they are here.”
She adds she and her husband have gone without a holiday for four years, “filling in the gaps the Government can’t”.
No change
Dublin native Greg Ó Ceallaigh, a human rights and immigration barrister in London, still finds trips home to be pricey.
He mentions the ‘two or three seconds’ of stunned silence that always follow whenever a Dublin barman tells him how many of these shiny yellow coins he needs to exchange for a pint of Guinness.
“I’m always terrified they’ll spot me for an emigrant during that brief moment of shocked speechlessness,” he says.
“Whenever I’m home all I spend money on is booze and food and both of those are so expensive in Dublin that I don’t notice the strength of the pound at all.”
Even if those coming back find themselves with more Euro in their pocket, Eurostat data shows consumer prices in Ireland are 18 per cent above the EU average, fifth highest out of 28 countries.
The ‘Rip Off Republic’ which Eddie Hobbs documented for RTÉ One in 2005 in many ways persists.
Ireland is the fourth most expensive country in the world in which to fill a car with petrol. The cost of alcohol is 78 per cent higher than in other EU countries and as one observer said, “it’s not like we don’t make any of it”.
Losers
Those hurt from the weaker Euro include recent Irish graduates and other job-seekers moving to Britain, who now find their Euro savings won’t stretch quite as far as they get their feet under the table.
These include Irish students at British universities. Aidan Cooney, who is completing a PhD at the UCL Institute of Education and runs the National University of Ireland Club of London, says: “UCL fees are costing me a whack on the exchange this term, the £800 term fee is costing me just shy of a few cents off e1,100.”
He adds that recent arrivals attending NUI Club events spoke about crippling outgoings from rent and six weeks’ deposits, and not having planned for council tax bills.
But these are not people wholly badly placed for the challenge.
The new graduates, the Semigrants, move readily between London and Ireland and want the best of both worlds.
They are young (70 per cent of new Irish emigrants are in their twenties), well-educated (62 per cent hold a third-level qualification), and as likely as not were in full-time work before chancing their luck abroad (47 per cent).
New information sources for net-savvy arrivals include the London Irish Centre’s online booklet Moving to London.
“It just might end up some may lose the equivalent of their communion money in initial foreign exchange rates but there is always Wetherspoons,” says Mr Cooney.
Painter Bernard Canavan, who presented a 2010 documentary on The Forgotten Irish for TV3, says: “With the Diaspora you will never be able to leave Ireland in the future, even if you wanted to it will always be with you.
“In the past, what was so depressing was that once you had stepped on the boat you had entered the atomised, alienated world of modernity, with its endless sense of process and time-watching. You had left the parish world where everyone knew you and life was marked by ‘Howya’ followed by your abbreviated and familiar first name and there was endless explanation of your position in the parish moral hierarchy.”
And if contemporary Ireland is increasingly a place where one feels undressed without a tech start-up, it will surprise few people that the Internet’s hot little new currency exchange marketplace, www.currencyfair.com, just happens to be headquartered in Dublin.
