“I didn’t have a plan. I just put everything in a bag, left it all behind and went to move in with my sister in Portugal.”
Clara Lemos made the decision to fly the nest in 2021, moving from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to live 8,000km away in Europe. With her Portuguese heritage, there was no need for her to get a visa.
“My great-grandmother was Portuguese, so you can get a passport all the way down. It’s almost unbelievable that it works like this.”
As everyone started to dust themselves off and emerge from Covid-induced lockdown, Lemos was able to quickly find work as a restaurant hostess. She studied electrical engineering in college, but like many of her peers she wanted to broaden her horizons, “try new things” and “have the experience of living abroad and knowing different people from different backgrounds and cultures”.
While in Portugal, she made a friend working for a start-up specialising in artificial intelligence, who recommended her. “The role was not exciting at all, but the company was,” she says of her experience as a “human conversation annotator”. From that moment on, she knew she wanted to pursue a career in tech, and where better to find one than “the tech hub of Europe”?
Setting her search filters to “entry-level”, “Ireland” and “tech”, she began the job hunt, and by summer 2022 she had found a new place to call home in Dublin, having landed a role as a junior technical consultant.
“Not only the big companies but the number of start-ups you have here is mind-blowing. There’s so many things going on. Even if you sit in a pub on the docks – just look around, everyone is working in tech, everyone is talking about AI. You just go around and see that everything is happening at the moment.”
In Brazil you always have proper food for lunch: rice, beans, chicken, vegetables, salad. Here a lot of people have a sandwich for lunch. I think this is not lunch
Dublin’s rental market proved tougher to crack. The 28-year-old recalls her desperate search to find somewhere to live. After almost two months, a friend of a friend (of a friend) from home pulled through and, after spending the first few weeks of her new job in a new country living in Airbnbs and temporary accommodation, Lemos finally had some security.
“I thought, You do the visits and decide where you want to live, and in Dublin it’s the opposite: the house decides if they want you,” she says, laughing.
She has lived in the same two-bedroom flat since then, luckily finding no big issues aside from how expensive it is: “10 times more than what I’d pay in Brazil.”
She says flat and house-sharing is something that sets renting in Ireland apart from Brazil.
“A lot of people share apartments. In Brazil it’s very rare for people to share a house. I think it’s because you have so much availability, you are deciding where you want to live and you have so many options. But here, it’s people fighting over space.”
Dublin’s nightlife stands out as being a pull factor for Lemos, who visited the country once as a teenager.
“When I was 19 I had a chance to do a small summer programme in Cambridge University, a business programme. When I was there I travelled to Dublin for two or three days to meet a friend. We went out to the pubs in the city centre. I had very little memory of the city, about the experience – I just remember I had fun there.”
Almost 10 years later, Lemos still loves the buzz of a night out in the Irish capital.
“I love the nightlife here, it’s very vivid. People love going out. I think Irish people and Brazilians have the mentality of enjoying life, having fun and just making the best of things.”
For Lemos, Ireland lives up to its reputation for having a strong drinking culture: “It’s impossible not to notice.”
“In Brazil I used to go out on the weekends but since I moved here I kind of shifted that. I go out on a Wednesday, on a Thursday, on the weekends.”
“You just have the pub life. After you finish work, it’s ‘Let’s go for a pint’ or ‘Let’s meet some friends and have dinner and a pint’ … I definitely drink more here than I used to drink at home.”
She clarifies that “when you go to a pub it’s more about the conversation and interaction with other people than the drinking itself”.
“I always say that I moved here for my job, but I stay in Ireland because of the people … and the Guinness,” she jokes.
The Guinness Storehouse is a firm favourite on her itinerary for when friends and family visit, something she likes to balance out with a morning bike ride in Phoenix Park.
When I got my job here, it was the first time that I felt that I equally like my job as much as my free time
One staple of Irish cuisine that Lemos has taken in her stride is the chicken fillet roll, although that one took a bit of warming up to.
“In Brazil you always have proper food for lunch: rice, beans, chicken, vegetables, salad. Here a lot of people have a sandwich for lunch. I think this is not lunch, why is everyone going for a chicken fillet roll? But I’ve kind of adjusted to that now. To be honest even when I go on holidays I’ll be like, where’s my chicken fillet roll?”
As a young woman working in the tech industry, she was pleasantly surprised to find there were lots of opportunities for career growth in Ireland. “The work experience I had in Brazil was very male-dominated, very hierarchical. Everyone was working more than they’re supposed to be working. People were being rude to you.”
“I feel like here we have women in higher positions and opportunities for women to grow. In Brazil, everyone in my company in a higher position was a man. So you’re like: well, how am I joining that club?
In her current job as a tech consultant she has already progressed to a more senior position.
“When I got my job here, it was the first time that I felt that I equally like my job as much as my free time. I think most companies from what I’ve seen in Irish culture, they give people space so they can have their personal time. Whereas in Brazil there are not that many boundaries,” she says.
In general, she finds gender disparities to be significantly less in Ireland and, having grown up in Rio de Janeiro, she finds herself much more comfortable navigating city life in Dublin.
“I’ve never felt unsafe ever since I moved here. I walk everywhere. I go out at night. I feel better treatment, more equal between men and women, in the work environment but also in other areas.”
