American Nick Howley (41) came to live in Limerick in October 2024, a month after his husband Brendan Roddy (45), a secondary-school art teacher and ceramicist who is also from the US, moved to the city to study, on a Master of Fine Arts programme at Limerick School of Art and Design.

The couple, who moved from southern Maine, initially planned to move to Limerick for a year while Roddy studied and Howley completed a special project for his American employer, which had just acquired a Dublin-based language ed-tech company.

When Howley’s company then offered him a permanent role in Ireland, “we kind of jumped at it,” he says.

The couple first visited Ireland on their honeymoon in 2017, attracted in part by the fact that Roddy has Irish heritage through his great-grandparents. Since then, they had returned for holidays every year, except during the Covid pandemic.

“It was a slow build-up. I think part of it was fuelled by [the idea that] it could be a better financial choice, part of it was fuelled by the [US] is getting a little bit scary, and then part of it was fuelled by the fact we loved the idea of living in Ireland or in other countries that we have visited – so it’s multifaceted.”

Howley describes “a palpable shift” in Washington DC, where he and Roddy lived before moving to Maine, after Donald Trump was first elected US president in 2016.

“You could feel this change occurring,” Howley says. “And for us [the move to Limerick] wasn’t down to the fact that [the Trump] administration took over; we were already here. We had been planning during the Biden administration to be here for my husband to go to graduate school, so it wasn’t necessarily fuelled to come here by politics, but I think part of the reason we’re staying is because of politics.

“We’re watching a case get worked up to the US supreme court that would reverse our marriage at the federal level, which is really scary.

“We got engaged the day before the supreme court decision came down in 2015 [establishing marriage equality nationwide in the US] and then we got married a year later, and we are one of the lucky ones where our marriage has always been recognised at both the state and the federal level.