Unraveling Ireland: High rates of immigration upend free speech and fiscal health |
On a clear winter day in Dublin, a cold wind blows down the Liffey and flutters the Palestinian flags at the souvenir stall on O’Connell Bridge. Flocks of European tourists take selfies at the Gothic gate of Trinity College, oblivious to the statue of stately, plump Edmund Burke, then mill in and out of souvenir shops selling tweed caps and cartoons of leprechauns. The bars are full, the buskers are better than in London, and the Guinness is more perfectly aerated than anywhere else in the world. The tourists come for a taste of the old Ireland. But the Irish live in a new country.
In 2024, according to the Irish government, 15.5% of Ireland’s population were not Irish citizens. The European Union recorded that Ireland’s foreign-born population was 1.2 million out of a total 5.4 million, or 22.4%: a higher rate than in the United States or Britain. The only EU states with higher percentages of foreign-born passport holders were the tax havens of Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Switzerland and the ask-no-questions Malta and Cyprus. In the EU as a whole, foreign-born people were 9.9% of the population. In the eastern states such as Hungary, Poland, and Romania, foreign-born people were in the low single figures.
In 2023, the most recent year for which statistics are available, nearly 30% of Irish babies were born to foreign-born mothers. Legal or illegal, immigrants to Europe aim for the wealthy welfare states. Look at it that way, and Ireland’s numbers are a marker of success.
Ireland was once a poor nation whose most valuable export was its people. It is now a wealthy nation that imports people faster than any other member of the EU. But Ireland’s economic, social and political foundations are not as solid as they seem — and free speech, perhaps the most foundational value of all, is under threat too.
“Céad míle fáilte,” the Irish say: “A hundred thousand welcomes.” Make that 125,300 official welcomes in the year to April 2025, not forgetting 18,560 illegal immigrants and asylum-seekers, 30% of whose appeals to remain succeeded at the first attempt, plus somewhere near 30,000 undocumented adults whose numbers are roughly equivalent to the population of the county town of Kilkenny.
In April 2025, Ireland’s Central Statistics Office estimated the total population at almost 5.5 million people. In the 12 months before, 125,300 legal immigrants came to Ireland. This was lower than the 149,200 in the previous 12 months. The impact of these numbers is offset by emigration — 69,900 in the year to April 2024, 65,600 in the year to April 2025. Still, the influx of legal immigrants over the last two years alone exceeds the 250,000 or so residents of Cork, Ireland’s second-largest city.
Returning Irish citizens comprised about one-fourth, 31,500, of immigrants in the year to April 2025. Another quarter were citizens of the United Kingdom, 4,900, and the EU, 25,300. The Central Statistics Office did not report whether arrivals in these categories descend from Ireland’s indigenous population or from recent immigration into Ireland or other European states. The remaining half of Ireland’s immigrants, 63,600, were from other countries. The 2022 census found that the other countries with the fastest-growing presence were India, 15%, and Brazil, 8%. A refugee Ukrainian population appeared soon after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Similarly, Ireland’s Syrian population quadrupled after the Syrian civil war.
As in its late-1990s leap forward from economic backwater to “Celtic Tiger” prestige, Ireland’s recent immigration........