Guest post: The depopulation and population of Ireland
Originally a comment by tigger_the_wing on Over in seconds.
As an Irish citizen who was born abroad and moved here over twenty-three years ago, I’ve seen the growth of the population and it really hasn’t been a problem for anyone except the racists and xenophobes, who would object to any immigration whatsoever. The total population is still little more than half what it was before the mass emigration due to the potato blight and subsequent deliberate starvation of the Irish people; Irish people still emigrate to other countries in large numbers.
The population of Ireland during the 2002 census (near enough twenty years ago) was 3,858,495. That same year, there were over half a million Irish-born people living in the UK. Also, thanks to the great number of Irish who moved to Britain during the famine and subsequently, it is estimated by some that there could be more than five million British-born people with at least one Irish grandparent, which would entitle them to automatic Irish citizenship. My mother is one – three of her grandparents were Irish.
The population in 2022 (the latest year for which the figure is available) was 5,123,536, an increase of 1,265,041, or about 33%, over the previous figure.
From the 2022 census page:
The question on nationality changed in Census 2022 to capture information on country of citizenship. This change may have impacted comparisons with previous census data.
84% of the population hold sole Irish citizenship, or (as I do) dual citizenship. For census purposes, both are counted as Irish. Twenty percent of the resident population were born abroad, but that includes those who are Irish citizens (such as offspring of Irish emigrants who returned to Ireland); only 12% of the population have citizenship of a different country, and no Irish citizenship.
For anyone interested, here’s the website of the government office with the official figures, which go into a great deal of detail.
Thank you, tigger.
You’re welcome, Tim.
Something I forgot to mention last night, but realised might not be obvious to everyone: the vast majority of residents in the Republic of Ireland who do not hold Irish citizenship come from other European countries, or from the UK. All Europeans have a right to live and work in any other European state, without having to change their nationality; and the UK and Ireland have a mutual freedom of movement agreement dating back to before their membership of the EU. So there are plenty of Irish citizens in the rest of Europe, as well as in the UK, and many of the born-abroad residents here are spouses of Irish citizens.
Also, I should point out that none of the figures include the six counties of Northern Ireland, which are part of the UK, not the Republic of Ireland (and, incidentally, not part of Britain either), but whose citizens are automatically entitled to Irish citizenship if they were born on the island of Ireland. The North has a much higher population density, thanks to the deliberate industrialisation of the region by the British and a lot of British immigration. There’s no obvious border, thanks to the Good Friday Agreement, and some roads meander across where it would be. The only ways to tell which country you are that the road signs are metric in the Republic, and Imperial in the North; and if you should wish to buy or sell something, the currency is the euro in the South and pounds in the North.
The population density of the Republic of Ireland, at 72 people per square kilometer, is lower than that of the EU overall (117) and about a quarter of that of the UK (277). By the way, Dublin’s population alone is about a quarter of the total, and most members of the rest of the population live in the other cities. The rural population is very sparse.
No one would disagree that the starvation was tragic and had tragic consequences. However, I don’t think one should underplay the importance of the potato blight (which was certainly not deliberate), and I think that calling the starvation deliberate is not really legitimate. Indifference to suffering, yes, but not deliberate. Compare the massacre of Armenians in 1915, which was certainly deliberate. Throughout history the wealthy and comfortable have shown little concern for the hardship of the poor, and the people who showed the most culpable indifference in the 19th century were Irish, not English. Ordinary English people knew almost nothing about it, but the Irish landowners, who, I emphasize, were Irish, from families established in Ireland for centuries, certainly did. Anthony Colclough (probably my great[9]grandfather — pronounced Coakley in Ireland, whereas their very distant relatives in Staffordshire pronounce it as the spelling suggests: Colcluff) moved to Ireland in 1542. Is that long enough ago to consider his descendants in Ireland to be Irish? Most landowning families in Ireland were no less Irish than Anthony Colclough’s descendants. My great-great-great grandfather William Colclough was not a landowner or particularly wealthy, just an ordinary member of the middle class in Dublin.
I’m still annoyed when I remember my eldest daughter’s wedding in California in 2000. A Plastic Paddy got up at the rehearsal dinner and gave a long drunken speech about how awful the English were. He must have known that the bride was English, but probably didn’t know that she would be automatically eligible for an Irish passport, having an Irish grandmother born in Dublin of Irish parents (and all known ancestors Irish) and brought up in Dublin. I thought of applying for an Irish passport myself when I was particularly cross about Brexit, but I didn’t, because my wife would not have been eligible. Instead we went for French, a long and extremely bureaucratic business, but eventually successful. I should be very surprised if the drunk at my daughter’s wedding was eligible for an Irish passport, and possibly couldn’t find Ireland on a world map.