London → Dublin, one year in: an honest review for anyone considering the same move
I moved from London to Dublin about a year ago for work. For what it's worth, I'm not British — London is just where I lived before this, so it's the only baseline I have. Before the move I read a load of posts comparing the two cities and most said some version of "they're not that different really." I want to push back on that, because I think it's genuinely misleading for anyone planning the same move.
This isn't a hit piece. I want to like it here. People are sound one-on-one and my colleagues have been great. The pay in my field is good, which is why I came. And the nature is the real deal: you can be on a cliff walk or up a mountain within half an hour of the city, and that has saved my sanity more than once. Those are real positives and I don't want to downplay them.
Here's everything else.
Weather
Worse than London on almost every measure. Colder, wetter, windier, less clear sky. London already isn't great. Dublin is a level below. There's a detailed side-by-side comparison here if you want the numbers.
Taxes and investing
Everyone's heard "Ireland is a tax haven." That's for corporations. For individuals it's the opposite.
As a higher earner you're at a 52% marginal rate between income tax, USC and PRSI, so you keep less than half of every extra euro. Fine, taxes exist everywhere. The investment situation is what kills me:
- No ISA equivalent. In the UK you can put £20k/year into an ISA and pay zero tax on gains or interest. Nothing like that exists here.
- CGT is 33% on most assets. For funds and ETFs it's 41% exit tax (not a typo). UK is 18%/24% depending on your rate.
- On top of that there's deemed disposal: you pay that 41% every 8 years whether you've sold or not.
- Savings interest is taxed at 33% (DIRT), and Irish savings rates are around 2-3% anyway, so after tax you get next to nothing.
As someone who normally invests constantly, I've ended up just sitting on cash not knowing what to do with it. The "Ireland = tax haven" myth is actively harmful to people making this move and nobody corrects it.
Banking
Three main banks: BOI, AIB, PTSB. I went with BOI. Both BOI and AIB charge a monthly fee just to have an account. In the UK most current accounts are free, and my Chase account pays nearly 5% on savings with cashback on top.
The BOI app is slow, dated and missing basics. To add my card to Apple Wallet I had to phone them. A phone call. In 2026. And you can't request a statement for a specific date range; it always runs from your last statement to now. Need January 2024 but a statement generated recently? Tough. I hear AIB is no better. Yes, everyone just uses Revolut day to day (which tells you something), but you still need one of the big banks for your salary or a mortgage.
Services in general
Everything feels half-finished.
Three: the My3 app only exists in the Irish App Store, so with a UK Apple ID you can't get it without switching your account region and losing your subscriptions. The website, your only alternative, is buggy, and there's one genuinely nasty trap: top up €20 while a plan is active and it doesn't add to your balance. It silently starts a new plan and resets your existing one, even with a full month left. No warning, no confirmation. I spent months on emails and calls about all of this. Every agent is surprised, fixes the immediate issue, and the underlying bugs survive. I've given up and I'm switching.
Broadband: constant random connection drops that I eventually diagnosed myself. It turned out to be a low-level network issue on the provider's side (packet sizes, for the technical people) that they seem unable or unwilling to fix. I had to buy my own router and configure a workaround. An ISP shouldn't be shipping this problem at all.
An Post: lost two of my parcels in the first month, and plenty more sat stuck for days or weeks. Royal Mail feels premium by comparison, which is a sentence I never expected to write.
Buying things: Amazon.ie has almost nothing, Amazon.co.uk adds import charges, no next-day delivery. I stopped using it entirely. It's wider than Amazon though: a lot of products here are marked up, less available, or not stocked at all, and when I order from the UK I get customs charges on top. The selection and pricing you get used to in the UK just doesn't exist here.
Healthcare
GP visits are €60-80 out of pocket for most working adults, more at some clinics, unless you qualify for a medical card or GP visit card (income-based, so most working professionals don't). Sore throat? That'll be €70. Coming from the NHS this is a real culture shock. Yes, your taxes fund the HSE, but unless you're on a low income you're paying per visit on top of all that, plus private insurance if you want it as yet another monthly cost.
Housing
London prices for Dublin quality. The crisis is well-documented so I won't labour it, but the value-for-money comparison is worse than most people expect. At least in London you can see what you're paying for.
Safety
This is the one I most want people to hear, because it's the part no "London vs Dublin" comparison prepared me for.
The city centre: tents pitched directly on main pedestrian routes, people visibly out of it wandering around, dealers working the same spots on the main streets every single day. There's open dealing outside the McDonald's on O'Connell Street literally daily. Gardaí do patrol O'Connell and Talbot, but every time I've actually seen a fight, open drug use, or a deal going down, they're nowhere to be found. And when there is enforcement, it seems to land on the users rather than the dealers standing ten metres away.
What I've witnessed regularly, in daylight:
- Fights on O'Connell and Talbot, near enough daily
- Open drug use, people smoking crack outside shops in the afternoon
- Teenagers firing fireworks directly at people (O'Connell, the docks, Dublin 7)
- Group shoplifting: recently watched about ten teenagers, most arriving on e-scooters, walk into a shop, take what they wanted, and stroll out. Nobody did anything. They weren't hurrying, because they know nobody will.
- Bikes and scooters being cut with bolt cutters and angle grinders mid-afternoon while people walk past
- Groups of teens intimidating other kids in the busiest parts of the centre, and sometimes squaring up to Gardaí themselves
More serious things I've personally witnessed: a motorcyclist dragged off his bike and beaten by teens on a scooter, who then rode off on it. A group of kids, 10 or 11 years old, in balaclavas, withdrawing wads of cash from an ATM on Talbot Street at lunchtime. I can only assume the cards weren't theirs. Dozens of people walked past and nobody said a word.
Then there's the scrambler and e-scooter situation, which deserves its own section.
Scramblers and bike theft
E-scooters: pairs of teens in balaclavas, everywhere, riding through red lights, between pedestrians, against traffic. They're also used as scouts, more on that in a second.
Scramblers: no registration, no insurance, no licence, usually no helmet. 100km/h in 50 zones, wheelies through junctions, weaving between cars and pedestrians. In practice Gardaí almost never pursue riders without helmets, since the risk to the rider is considered too high, and the riders know it. They are effectively untouchable. I've watched it happen directly in front of a stationary Garda car.
Here's what that looks like when you own a motorbike. I bought one. Within a day, teens on e-scooters were circling me mid-ride, filming me and photographing my plate. These are scouts who track bikes through the city and pass info up the chain. I parked outside a restaurant where I could watch the bike through the window; within ten minutes two people in balaclavas pulled up on an e-scooter and started methodically checking my locks. I moved the bike out of the city.
Then a few weeks ago it escalated: four lads in balaclavas on two scramblers, no plates, ambushed me mid-ride in north Dublin on a Thursday evening. They boxed me in on both sides and signalled at me to pull over. I bolted, and they chased me through traffic for kilometres. I was on to 999 from the start; it was over before anyone could get near me. I wrote it up in full here if you want the details. I went to the Garda station afterwards to report it properly. Nothing came of it, and everyone I spoke to seemed to expect exactly that.
I know how this reads, like I had a uniquely bad run. But there's a documentary about Dublin's scrambler scene filmed a year ago, and I still see the same lads doing wheelies on the same street every other day. Dig through old Reddit threads and people have been describing exactly this for a decade. Nothing changes.
And the consequences are real. In January a teenage girl, Grace Lynch, died after a scrambler crash. In June a boy with additional needs was seriously injured in a scrambler hit-and-run at the Five Lamps; the rider fled, then came back with a group and circled the injured kid and his family. That was the same month I got chased.
The political response was Grace's Law: scramblers are now banned in all public places. But dangerous driving was already illegal. Riding without a licence, insurance, or plates was already illegal. The people doing this were already breaking half a dozen laws, and making it illegal again changes nothing if the one thing everyone knows is that Gardaí won't pursue you. The UK went the other way and gave police more room to pursue. Until riding a stolen scrambler with no helmet stops working as an immunity shield, no new offence on the books will matter.
The justice side
Two teenagers were caught red-handed outside my house trying to steal my scooter. Angle grinder, screwdriver in the ignition lock, all on CCTV, and a passing Garda unit caught them in the act. They did an excellent job. A month later I got a letter: juvenile warning. Under-18s go through a diversion process rather than prosecution for most offences. I understand the thinking behind it, but in practice everyone, including the kids, knows there are no real consequences, and they act accordingly.
Meanwhile: I was attacked on O'Connell by a woman who coughed in my face and started shoving me. I pushed her off, and you'd think I'd pulled a gun. She was shocked, bystanders were shocked, and several of them warned me that I'd be the one in trouble if it went further. You can't carry pepper spray here either; it's classed as a prohibited weapon. So in practice: Gardaí won't chase them, the courts won't touch them if they're underage, and you're not allowed to defend yourself. It's completely backwards.
Oh, and insurance as a new arrival: 3 of 4 insurers wouldn't quote me at all (they want 1-2 years of residency first), and the fourth wanted €2,000 for third-party only on a bike my friends here insure fully comp for €200-400.
"But Ireland is safe"
People at work tell me this constantly. Low crime, sure it's grand. And on paper the stats agree. But I've stopped believing the stats, because I've seen how they're made. The shoplifting isn't reported. The bike thefts mostly aren't reported. My chase produced nothing. The two kids caught on CCTV with an angle grinder produced a warning letter. When reporting reliably goes nowhere, people stop reporting, and then the numbers look great. Low recorded crime is not the same thing as low crime. After a year here I don't feel safe in this city centre, day or night, in a way I never once felt in London, which is supposedly the dangerous one.
For contrast: where I grew up, plenty of people don't even lock their bikes. People aren't saints there; stealing just isn't worth it, because you will actually get in trouble, including as a teenager. Every city has crime. What shocks me as an outsider is how completely everyone here seems to have accepted that nothing will be done about it.
The vibe
Everything closes early except pubs. If drinking is your hobby, Dublin works. If it isn't, options are thin.
Public transport is its own experience. I've had vaping on the bus, actual cigarettes on the bus, and more times than I can count, someone sitting next to me in a state where I've had to wash everything I was wearing when I got home. I get that homelessness is a complex problem, but a bus full of passengers who can't leave isn't the place to absorb it.
TL;DR: London and Dublin are not "basically the same." Taxes and investing are much worse for individuals here. Banking, telecoms, post and healthcare are all a step down. The city centre has a real safety problem that's been the same for a decade, and the fixes so far amount to banning things that were already illegal. The nature is lovely and the people are sound. Go in with eyes open.