The Irish population grew by 11.7% in 2011-2022 (535,000: 362,000 in 2016-2022) while net housing units were at 130,000 at Census 2022 in April (new completions from 2011 were at 163,000 in December 2022; 29,000 in 2011-2015). However, employment (15 years +) in 2011-2022 (Q3) jumped by 668,000 or 35% (the unemployment rate was above 15% in 2011 and at 4.5% in 2022). Non-Irish nationals (excluding naturalised) were at 13.8% of the population. Inward migration in 2016-2022 was 190,330 and almost 47,000 settled in the Dublin area in the 6-year period.
Foreign-born residents of the Republic of Ireland have overtaken the number of Irish-born living overseas. Residents of Northern Ireland are not included.
According to Census 2022, the total population was 5.124mn — the highest since 1851.
In the Census 1991, the total population was 3.297mn. The foreign-born population was 5.5% — Great Britain was at 3.9% and the Rest of the World was at 1.6%. In 1981 the total number was 5.6% and in 1971 it was 2.5%.
The first census was held in the Irish Free State in 1926. The population was 2.972mn and the foreign-born population was also 2.5%.
The rate was 12% in 2011 including about 40,000 people, who got certificates of naturalisation that were issued to people from 2000 to 2011.
In April 2022 the foreign rate in the total population was 18.5% compared with 14% for expatriates. The rates compared with the native-born population were 23% and 17%.
In England & Wales in the last decade, the Irish-born population fell 80,000 to 325,000 and adding 21,000 for Scotland, Great Britain has a current population of about 67mn and the Irish population is about 346,000.
Since Brexit in 2016 about 100,000 Irish passports have been issued annually to British residents. "If one of your grandparents was born in Ireland, but neither of your parents was born in Ireland, you may become an Irish citizen."
The Irish-born total in the US Census in 2019 was 112,000 while 10% of the American population identified as having an Irish heritage.
Canada has an Irish-born population of 29,000 and Australia's is at about 75,000. My estimate of the Rest of the World is about 120,000.
For example, in 2019 there were 17,600 Irish nationals in Germany according to national statistics. France (it's a guess that there are about 20,000 Irish expatriates) and Spain (15,000 on the basis of residency filings) may have about a total of 35,000 Irish residents. There were over 11,000 German residents in Ireland according to Census 2016. The French and Spanish populations in Ireland were at similar levels to Germany.
Foreign-borns include naturalised residents in Ireland, however as detailed above, an Irish passport holder overseas may never have been in Ireland.
According to Eurostat, the EU's statistical service, the Irish foreign-born population was 883,300 on January 1, 2021. Some reports incorrectly cite this figure as relating to the year 2021. My estimate for April 2022 is 950,000. Check Table 4 and Table 5 here.
The term Non-Irish excludes the naturalised.
Dwellings per thousand inhabitants
Dwellings per thousand inhabitants is a useful metric for comparing housing output performance with other countries such as in Europe. I have it produced here from 1971: Key Irish housing statistics 1971-2020.
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) says "The number of dwellings per thousand inhabitants is around 468, on average, among OECD countries, below the EU average of 495 in 2020. There are considerable differences across countries. The number of dwellings in relation to the population is highest in Greece, France, Italy, Portugal, Bulgaria, Finland, Spain and Latvia (with over 550 dwellings per thousand inhabitants). In contrast, the number of dwellings reported is the lowest in South Africa (283), Colombia (294), Korea (310) and Costa Rica (310).
The number of dwellings per thousand inhabitants increased between 2011 and 2020 in all but six countries: Croatia, Ireland, Czechia, Iceland, New Zealand and Luxembourg.
Chile, Lithuania and Türkiye reported the biggest increase in the number of dwellings per thousand inhabitants over this period."
The ratio was 417 in 2006 when Ireland had a record housing output of 93,000 homes, representing a 13th year of consecutive growth. The net inward migration grew to 6.8% in 1996-2002 and 11.7% in 2002-2006.
Before the bubble burst in late 2008, the housing output was still inadequate to meet the population boom.
The net migration growth was -1.1% in 2011-2016 and 6.6% in 2016-2022.
The Irish dwellings per 1,000 capita ratio is 415 in 2022.
In 2011-2022 housing completions grew to 163,300 and the housing stock expanded by 129,700 (allowing for houses that were knocked down).
In 2011-2016 housing completions were at 29,217 while the population grew by 173,614. In the following census period, the population expanded by 361,670.
The total population growth in 2011-2022 was 535,300 people which was four times the housing output.
The population in the 12 months to April 2022 increased by 88,800 persons, the largest 12-month increase since 2008.
The number of immigrants was 120,700, a 15-year high in the 12 months to April 2022.
According to the Central Statistics Office (CSO) 28,900 were returning Irish nationals, 24,300 were other EU nationals, and 4,500 were UK nationals. The remaining 63,000 immigrants were other nationals including almost 28,000 Ukrainians in the 12-month period.
More people emigrated than in recent years with 59,600 persons departing the State compared with 54,000 in 2021. Irish net inward migration was 1,300.
The natural increase of 27,700 people in the State comprised 60,700 births less 33,000 deaths.
The CSO reported that there were 768,900 persons living in Ireland aged 65 and over in April 2022. Those aged 65 and over had an increase in population share between 2016 and 2022, rising from 13.3% to 15.1% of the total, a volume increase of 139,100 persons.
The Census 2022 preliminary results show that the population rise in 2016-2022 of 361,670 was made up of a natural increase of 171,340 and an estimated net inward migration of 190,330.
The biggest inward migration was reported in Dublin (+46,600), Cork (+20,900) and Meath (+14,920).
Ireland's FDI over-dependence and surging population
Social housing
In the 1990s Ireland emulated Britain by selling off most of the council house stock to tenants, at steep discounts.
A report from the ESRI (Economic and Social Research Institute) this year highlighted that the number of tenants that have their rents subsided monthly by the State had more than doubled from 134,973 to 293,673 in the past 28 years. Some 54% of 550,000 renters needed State support according to the ESRI, “Almost 300,000 (293,673) households received support for their housing costs in 2020, up from 134,973 in 1994. This amounts to 16% of households overall" and private owners get up to €1bn annually.
The CSO (Central Statics Office) in 2016 reported that a 'Single person household' accounted for 25% of the support while 'One parent (female) household' was at 30% and 'One parent (male) household' was at 2.4%.
In one of the several public schemes, Housing Assistance Payments (HAP) in 2019 had about 58,000 participants. Irish nationals accounted for 63% while of the 37% foreign nationals EU - East (Eastern Europe) accounted for 21%.
In the past, social housing, in computer terms had the hardware but the software was typically inadequate. In Dublin, the distant 'Corpo' often left the minority of bullies in control of estates while non-payment of rent was common.
It's likely to happen again.
In Amsterdam, social housing is about 45% of the housing stock while the national average in The Netherlands is at 33%.
Dutch housing associations are funded by the government and there is local control where rules are enforced.
In the City of Vienna, more than 60% of the city's 1.8mn inhabitants live in subsidised housing and nearly half of the housing market is made up of city-owned flats or cooperative apartments.
Fairy tales of Irish economy obscure truth
OECD: "The difference between immigration into and emigration from the area during the year (net migration is therefore negative when the number of emigrants exceeds the number of immigrants)."
"Most countries send out oil or iron, steel or gold, or some other crop, but Ireland has had only one export and that is its people," John Fitzgerald Kennedy said at Cork City Hall, on his presidential visit to Ireland in June 1963.
Patrick Kennedy (1823–1858), the great-grandfather of the president left Ireland for Boston in 1848.
The Irish Free State which covered 83% of the island began as an independent state in 1922 and from 1938 when a second constitution came into force with the state being renamed Eire/ Ireland, had a roughly flat population in the 35 years 1926-1961 [2.972mn (1926); 2,968mn (1936; 2,955mn) 1946; 2961mn (1951); 2.898mn (1956) and 2.818mn (1961).
The population in the area that became the Republic of Ireland was 6.529mn in 1841. The population of the island was 8.175mn.
In the US census of 1880, there was a peak of 1.855mn Irish-born, second to Germans. In the 1881 British census of Ireland, the ratio of the area that would become the Republic of Ireland had a population of 3.870mn and the US Irish-born was 48.6% of the home population. The island population was 5.156mn in the British census and the ratio was 36.4%.
In the US in the 1920s/1930s immigration restrictions and the Great Depression resulted in Britain being the top country for Irish immigrants. In 1960 the Irish-born in the US were at 339,000 while in 1961 in Britain Irish-born were at a peak of 683,000.
In 1960/1961 Irish-born in the UK, the US and Australia (21,000) were 37% of the home population.
The 1911 British census covered the whole island and in the Free State area net emigration in 1911-1926 was 405,000; between 1926 and 1936 the net emigration was 166,750; net emigration in 1936-1946 was 187,110. For the period 1946-1961, the level was at 528,380.
In late 1956 John A. Costello, Irish taoiseach (prime minister), made a bold move by ignoring the conservatism of Gerard Sweetnam, the finance minister, and Kenneth Whitaker, the secretary of the Department of Finance. The Export Profits Tax Relief (EPTR) became law in December 1956 with a 50% remission on export profits. It was the beginning of the foreign direct investment (FDI) that would transform Ireland.
In 1930, when the population of Cork City was approximately 80,000, Ford employed 7,000 there. The assembly operations were closed in 1984. Henry Ford & Son Ltd. was the star company in Cork.
...William Norton, leader of the Labour Party and tánaiste (deputy prime minister,) in two governments (1948-1951) and (1954-1957) was active in promoting the US and West German foreign direct investment (FDI) as minister of industry and commerce in the second government, while Seán Lemass, who held the same portfolio as Norton in government, was ambivalent about FDI.
De Valera, Leader of the Opposition and founder of Fianna Fáil, criticised the government’s handing over Irish resources to foreigners "festooned with tax reliefs." See more here:
Ireland in 1922 not the poorest state in Western Europe but it was in 1973
In the 1960s in Western Europe, there was an unprecedented economic boom which also helped Ireland. Emigration began to fall.
At last, in 1971 there was net immigration for at least the first time since the Potato Famine of the 1840s.
In the 'The Great Irish Famine'(1989) Cormac Ó'Gráda of University College Dublin wrote that about 1.5mn left the island of Ireland between Waterloo and the Famine (1815-1845). One-third of the voluntary trans-Atlantic movement was by Irish residents.
Significant emigration returned in the 1980s and there was net immigration in the year 1991. It was positive from 1995-2008.
In 1989, Intel of the US, then the world's biggest chip/semiconductor firm (now No 5), announced a plan to build a fab facility in Ireland. In what became known as the Celtic Tiger period in 1993-2001, about 300 mainly American high-tech industrial projects were introduced. Dr Garret FitzGerald, former taoiseach (prime minister), wrote in 2007 "These increased almost fivefold the value of our manufacturing output, trebled the volume of exports, and, most important of all, virtually quadrupled the reported money value of the average industrial worker's output."
Governments since the 1960s had prioritised education and participation of women in the workforce jumped.
As referred to above, there were not enough houses built during the period while prices in the decade to 2007 quadrupled.
The crazy market in houses also extended to land and the central bank was run by stupid people. This gave the Irish banks a licence to borrow overseas while offering 100% mortgages or low deposits of 5%.
Ronan Lyons, a Trinity College academic, commented "Of the 850,000 or so homes built in Ireland between 1996 and 2015, fewer than one in six were urban apartments. But these are precisely the homes that Ireland needed to build as it converged to European patterns of urbanization and household size. In contrast, over four times as many – 60% of all new homes built – were built in rural areas, and the vast majority were for larger households, which were a declining share of Ireland’s population."
When the bubble burst all the domestic banks had to be bailed out.
Emigration commenced again in 2009 at a large scale for native Irish and there was a slight net immigration by 2014, which has grown since.
