The latest release of headline data from the Central Statistics Office makes for interesting reading.
They confirm that inward migration is at an extremely high level, and most of that is not even accounted for by the large numbers of people who have arrived in Ireland from Ukraine. “There were 120,700 immigrants, a 15-year high,” the CSO states.
Of the 120,700 people who came to live in Ireland between April 2021 and April 2022, 28,900 were Irish nationals who have returned from living overseas. That is almost balanced by the 27,600 Irish nationals who left the country.
When we take into account that another 32,000 non-Irish nationals who left, that total net migration to the country to April 30 was 61,000.
Immigration has therefore not just increased but almost doubled in comparison to the same period between April 2020 and April 2021.
Covid restrictions impacted travel in that period but the numbers are still more than twice the 55,900 who came to Ireland in 2013. In the past ten years therefore, 800,000 people have come from overseas.
The population is now estimated to be 5,100,200. Of that number 703,700 or 13.8%. are described as “non-Irish nationals.”
However, that is a significant under-estimate of the actual number of people who are living in Ireland but were born overseas.
The reason for that is that it does not include the number of persons living here who have become naturalised Irish citizens and hold dual nationality between Ireland and the country of their birth.
Thus, while the percentage of non-nationals living in Ireland according to the 2016 Census was given as 11.6%, that did not include over 100,000 who held dual nationality, nor those claiming to have either no nationality or multiple nationalities, nor presumably the bulk of the 70,766 people who entered no nationality on their 2016 Census form.
The total number of persons in 2016 who described themselves as “Irish” was 3,977,729. That accounted for 83.5% of the total number of people enumerated. The figures for all nationalities can be searched at https://data.cso.ie/table/E7002
The numbers accounted for in those tables differ slightly from the official figure of 4,761,865 but only by a small fraction so the overall proportions are accurate.
If they are, then the actual percentage of non nationals living in the Irish state in 2016 was over 16%, not 11.6%.
That is quite a difference. In fact it suggests that the figure given by the CSO is understated by 37.9%.
If the same criteria are then applied to the latest statistics from the CSO, then it would probably not be an exaggeration to state that close to one million or 20% of the population of the Irish Republic now consists of people who were born in another country.
People may differ as to whether they think this is a good thing, or otherwise. To make it an article of faith that numbers are much lower than they are, or that none of this is having, and will continue to have, a radical impact on all aspects of life in Ireland is serving nobody any good purpose.