TL;DR: The following is an attempt I made at writing an article specifically for Irish news outlets such as The Irish Times. It is not exactly my usual style of writing, but it was an enjoyable challenge to write something that could possibly fit into the lifestyle section of any Sunday newspaper. Enjoy!
I arrived in Sweden at the end of October 2020 with a ski jacket, a pack of Lyons teabags, and the unshakeable confidence of a man who had absolutely no idea what he was doing. The plan was simple: spend a winter in the northern wilderness, clear my head, avoid a pandemic, and be back in Dublin by spring.
It is now 2026, there’s a ten-month-old baby asleep in the next room, and I can’t remember the last time I had a decent Guinness.
The original logic, I should say, was not entirely faulty. I had been renting in Dublin city centre with my partner, and like so many we were one landlord or redundancy notice away from disaster. When the pandemic and the accompanying economic uncertainty it brought arrived, we knew the clock was ticking so we took a chance and started packing. My partner convinced me that a few months in their homeland of the frozen north would do wonders for us and provide the space needed to make a more long-term plan. Sweden also offered something almost radical: affordability. The cost of rent over here compared to Ireland is ridiculous, and after so many years of being denied an opportunity to build a life in my own country, this was very tempting.
Sweden, it turns out, is extremely good at letting you build a life. This surprised me. I had expected bureaucracy and an impenetrable wall of Scandinavian reserve. And yes, the reserve is real, but beneath it is a society that has quietly and efficiently arranged itself around the idea that people deserve stable lives. Housing is not a game of chance here. Healthcare does not bankrupt you. My baby was born in a Swedish hospital last November, and the experience was almost incomprehensibly calm. These are not small things when you have a young family. When you are weighing up where to put down roots, the cost of a mortgage is only part of the calculation. You’re also calculating school places, GP waiting lists, and the likelihood that a landlord will upend your life six months before your child starts school. In Ireland, those calculations have become almost impossible to make with any confidence. In Sweden, they are possible. The ground beneath you feels solid.
It was in that Swedish hospital last November, holding my child for the first time, that something shifted in me — some last, stubborn assumption I had been carrying for five years. The assumption that this was all still temporary. That Ireland was still the long term destination, and Sweden merely the detour. Looking at them, I felt that assumption quietly dissolve. You cannot raise a child on a detour. So the question, almost without my noticing, had changed. It was no longer when are you going back? It was why would I go back?
I still live in the north of Sweden, in a quiet town far from the capital. It’s the kind of place where the winters are long and genuinely beautiful, and the pace of life is something that even an Irish person would think is a bit slow. When I need a dose of energy, I take the high-speed train south to Stockholm. It's a four-hour journey, but an extraordinary one. It’s the kind of train travel that reminds you why train travel exists. The seats are comfortable and spacious, there’s a well-stocked bar, and the scenery outside your window is nothing short of epic. It's on trains like that when I find myself thinking about Ireland the most, and a part of me would always rather be on a DART heading out to Bray or Howth.
I want to be careful here, because this is not a piece about Ireland failing me, although in many ways it absolutely did. There is just something genuinely painful about watching the country you love from a distance and understanding, with increasing clarity, that the life you might have built there is now beyond reach. Not because you left, but because it became unreachable even before you were gone. Friends who stayed in Dublin describe a city that is still somehow short of places where an ordinary person might afford to live. The conversations I have with people who are trying to buy their first home in Ireland now have a particular quality to them: a grim, black-humoured resignation. That very Irish way of suffering that insists on being funny about itself even as it genuinely, quietly despairs. I am not immune to that despair, even from here. Perhaps especially from here. Distance has a way of sharpening certain feelings.
It may sound cliché, but what I miss the most is the people. My tribe. We have a particular approach to life that I have not found replicated anywhere in Sweden. The Swedes are grand. They’re thoughtful, fair-minded, quietly generous, and deeply invested in their flat-pack furniture. However, they have absolutely no idea what craic is. They’re not built for it. Their social life tends towards the scheduled and planned in advance. There is very little room in the Swedish cultural imagination for the idea that a Tuesday night might simply become something, that you might wander into a pub at nine o'clock and find yourself, at two in the morning, having the best conversation of the year with four people whose names you barely caught.
I miss Irish pubs. I miss Fibbers and The International. I miss my friends in a way that doesn't diminish with time so much as change shape. I miss my family in a way that video calls have never resolved, and that feels more acute now, knowing my child is growing up at a distance from the people who would have surrounded them in another life. I miss the feeling of being somewhere that knows me, that shares a reference point, that has seen Father Ted and The Late Late Show, and that will laugh at the same things without requiring a thirty-second cultural preamble. My child will grow up straddling two countries, as children of emigrants do. They will be shaped by both, but fully native to neither. I find this beautiful and also, on certain evenings, something close to heartbreaking. They will speak Swedish before they speak Irish. They’ll see reindeer before they see the Phoenix Park deer.
I did not move to Sweden because I stopped loving Ireland. I moved because of an unaffordable rental market, and then I stayed because Sweden turned out to be a very good place to build a life. Those two things are both true, and they sit awkwardly together, the way the most honest things often do. What I hoped, for a long time, was that the situation in Ireland would change, and that housing would become less of a crisis and more of a policy, and that the country would find a way to hold onto the people it produces. I haven't given up on that hope entirely. But I have stopped organising my life around it.
Northern Sweden is my home now. I say that plainly, because I think it is true, even though some part of me still winces at it. The wilderness that was supposed to last a winter has lasted almost six years and counting. The ski jacket is still very much in use. And in the quiet moments while on a northbound train watching the forest close back in around me, or sitting up late after the baby has finally settled, I think about the strange directions a life can take.
I'll be back for visits, of course. I am forever a child of Ireland. I'm just not sure, anymore, that I'll be back for good.
-Josh