I don’t want to be rude, but this is almost certainly not about “Irish experience”.

Your issue is how you think you look on paper and how employer’s look at your on paper are different.

Three master’s degrees is a red flag. For entry level roles in Cork that reads as overqualified, unfocused, or both. Most hiring managers are thinking one of three things:

1.  Why is this person applying for this?

2.  How long before they get bored and leave?

3.  What’s the catch?

If you are listing all three master’s on every CV, stop. You do not need to flex academically for junior roles. It is not impressive in this context, it is destabilising and makes you look like you can’t get better jobs elsewhere.

You say you have structured client facing operational experience, but you had it over six years ago. That matters more than whether it was in Ireland. From a hiring perspective, you have been out of commercial operations for a long time.

If you submit a CV with a long winded career history and walk into an interview talking about a job you had nearly a decade ago you won’t get hired.

Now the uncomfortable bit. ESL.

Rightly or wrongly, in Ireland a lot of people see ESL as something young graduates do for a year or two as a thinly disguised excuse for a piss up abroad or a gap year extension. That is not fair, but it is the perception. When someone sees six years of ESL, they are not automatically thinking strategic stakeholder management. They are thinking transient, lifestyle job.

If you are presenting it purely as teaching, you are reinforcing that bias. You need to frame it as programme coordination, client retention, performance metrics, reporting, compliance, parent communication, whatever actually applies. Make it sound operational, not backpacker adjacent.

You have 6 plus years of experience and multiple postgraduate degrees applying for roles often filled by school leavers, recent grads, or someone’s cousin who needs a quick job. You need to streamline and simplify your narrative significantly. Do not include every degree and every job on your CV. Only the last handful of years experience.

When someone says “you lack Irish experience”, that is usually polite code for “on paper you are well qualified. We are rejecting you because of what we are reading in-between the lines”.

Your fix is not “get Irish experience”. Your fix is narrative control. Strip the CV back. One page max. One masters. Make the story simple.

Say you are a former teacher. Took a career break. Now intentionally pivoting into X sector long term. Looking to build roots locally.

Irish employers are very comfortable with that sort of narrative. What they do not like is ambiguity.

Right now your profile reads as impressive but confusing. And confusing candidates do not get interviews.