There is a schizophrenic aspect to the attitude of the Irish establishment (for ease of definition include all of the main political parties, churches and media outlets) to mass immigration. In one breath they will assure you that it is The Best Thing Ever. In the next they will go to inordinate lengths to obscure the statistical facts underlying demographic change.
Thus, following the release on Tuesday of the CSO’s annual Population and Migration Estimates some were keen to venture the opinion that the statistics undermined all manner of For Roysh tropes with regard to the scale and the trend of what is taking place here.
Ronan McGreevy of the Irish Times declared in a tweet that it is “Important to have the facts when debating immigration.” Indeed it is, and Gript – unchallenged on any use of statistically based facts – has been doing just that for some six years now when few other media outlets would touch the subject with a barge pole.
McGreevy ironically committed a bit of a faux pas because he claims that “Population is 83.7 per cent Irish born and 16.3 non-Irish born.” It is not.
He is repeating the ‘error’ that used to dominate the headlines on CSO releases and even the Census which is to confuse the figure for citizenship with the figure for persons living in the Irish state who were born overseas.
The total population according to citizenship is estimated to be 5,458,600. Of that number 4,570,200 are Irish citizens and 888,400 are citizens of other countries. That does equate to the percentages referred to by McGreevy and others.
It does not include persons born overseas who are living here and have acquired Irish citizenship.
To illustrate this there were 631,785 people enumerated in Census 2022 who had other than Irish citizenship. However, the Census found that there was a total of 1,017,437 persons who had been born outside of Ireland. That represented just under 20% of the population as a whole.
385,652 of those born overseas had acquired Irish citizenship. That does not make them ‘Irish born’. Nor is that number largely comprised of the children or grandchildren of persons born outside of the country of Irish parentage, as is sometimes claimed.
Nor of former UK citizens who between 2013 and 2023 accounted for just 5% of citizenship certificates. Immigrants from the ‘rest of the world’ have been granted 74% of the 138,270 citizenships with the remaining 21% granted to persons born in other EU states. 2024 is not yet included in the statistics published by the CSO but more than 30,000 were issued last year, up from just over 18,000 in 2023.
The 2022 Census showed that there was a gap of 7.5% between the number of people living in the state who had been born overseas and the number who had other than Irish citizenship.
If there is the same gap now between the figure for persons of other than Irish citizenship and the number of people born outside of the country then somewhere in the region of 24% of the population have been born outside of Ireland.
That is an estimate but even if we confine ourselves to the citizenship statistics the scale of what is happening is enormous. If we were only to add the number of non Irish citizens to the 2022 figures for those born outside the state the non Irish population as a proportion of the current estimate would be 23.3%.
According to the 2022 Census the population of the state was 5,149,139. The CSO estimates that the population has increased by 309,461 in the past three years. An extraordinary growth rate of 6%. A cause of great celebration and comparisons to An Gorta Mór and so on.
Ponder this. Since 2022 the number of people living here with other than Irish citizenship has increased by 256,615. The number of Irish citizens which also includes persons born overseas who have been ‘naturalised’ since 2022 has grown by a mere 52,846.
Which means that of the estimated population increase since 2022 that people coming to live here with other than Irish citizenship have accounted for 83% of that growth.
That is in line with the most recent CSO population projections which forecast – in each of three models they use – that immigration will account for 90% of population growth over the next 30 years.
With the declining birth rate and the net migration of Irish people – 7,800 more Irish people have left the state than have returned since 2022 – the trend is clear. Especially when the bulk of Irish emigrants are young people such as the 13,500 who left for Australia between April 2024 and April 2025.
By way of comparison statistics from Germany show that, at the end of 2024, 15% of the population there had been born outside of the country. However, the total number of persons with a ‘foreign background’ which includes those born outside the state, naturalised foreigners and their children was just under 30%.
Ireland is not only on the same trajectory as Germany but as we have seen is significantly ahead of the curve.
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