Non-Irish citizens living in Ireland now account for 12% of the total population, according to Census 2022.
The latest data released by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) in relation to diversity, migration, ethnicity, Irish Travellers and religion was published today.
It shows that almost 632,000 non-Irish citizens were living in Ireland at the time of the last census. This is a one percentage point increase on Census 2016.
Nearly half of these were EU citizens (313,000), while a further 83,000 were UK citizens. However, the number of UK citizens living in Ireland is continuing to decline, down by nearly 20% from 2016.
In the year before the last census, the CSO said that over 89,500 people immigrated to Ireland.
This included more than 22,000 Irish citizens, most commonly moving here from the UK, Australia and the USA.
More than 10,000 of those who moved to Ireland in the year before the census were from India, and a further 5,000 came from Brazil.
The CSO says there has been a noticeable growth of 131% in the number of citizens from European countries outside the EU to more than 25,000, but this was largely driven by the Ukrainian crisis.
The Census data shows that 77% of people, or just under 3.9 million, identified their ethnic group or background as “White Irish”.
The next largest ethnic group was “Any other white background” (10%), followed by Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi (2%), and Black or Black Irish at 1%.
The Census 2022 data shows that Irish Travellers have a younger population than the overall population.
The data shows that there are nearly 33,000 Irish Travellers living in Ireland, an increase of 6%.
The average age of Irish Travellers was 27, compared with 39 for the total population, while just 5% of Irish Travellers are aged over 65, compared with 15% in the overall population.
Children under 15 account more than a third of Irish Travellers, compared with 20% for the total population.
The number of people living in Ireland who say they have “no religion” has increased by 63%.
The latest data published by the CSO shows that more than 736,000 people, or 14% of the population, reported having no religion in the last Census carried out in 2022.
This was an increase of 63% from the last census in 2016.
The Census also shows that the percentage of the population who identified as Roman Catholic fell from 79% in 2016 to 69% in 2022.
The CSO said that people aged between 25 and 29 were less likely to be Roman Catholics than other groups and was also the age cohort with the highest proportion of people with no religion.
It said religion varied by citizenship, with 70% of Polish citizens being Roman Catholic, 41% of UK citizens had no religion, and almost half of Indian citizens were Hindu.
