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“They’re not coming for a holiday, they’re coming for work,” said Ms. Murphy.

The demand is expected to be just as high next year, even with a record 10,000 visas on offer.

Of course, the 24-month visas are not a guarantee of citizenship.

“It gives them time, if they’re skilled, to get the necessary experience to apply for residency,” said Ms. Murphy.

If they are not skilled — and not in a province with severe labour shortages — they will be sent home when their visas expire.

“Canada just seemed like such a prosperous country. … We just figured it was now or never,” said Grainne Burns, who came to Toronto under the IEC program last August.

Although she says she is not making as much money as she did working at an Irish trade magazine, “we have a far better quality of life.”

“[In Ireland] you’re surrounded by all your friends who have been hit hard, so it is quite depressing over there at the moment … you’re just surrounded by negativity a lot,” she said.

Although Ireland spent much of the 2000s in an economic juggernaut that earned it the nickname the “Celtic Tiger,” the 2008 global economic collapse plunged it into a new age of austerity, plummeting real estate prices and pushing up the unemployment rate to 14.5%.

If they are not skilled — and not in a province with severe labour shortages — they will be sent home when their visas expire.

More than 100,000 Irish have left the country in the past two years, virtually an entire generation of Irish youth decamped.

“I am one of just two of my university friends still in Ireland,” graduate Bridget Fitzsimons wrote to the Irish Times last October. “It is hard to make an argument for Dublin when nobody lives here anymore.”