Catalina Espinosa
Research expert covering society, economy, and politics for Europe and the EU
Demographics of Ireland - statistics & facts
The population of the Republic of Ireland was estimated to be 5.28 million in 2023, compared with around 2.97 million in 1950. Although Ireland's population has been steadily growing since the middle of the 20th Century, the historic population of Ireland was once much larger. In 1841, the population of the 26 counties that would become the Republic of Ireland was around 6.53 million, before the Great Famine (1845-51) led to the deaths of over a million people, and forced many to leave emigrate from Ireland, particularly to the United States.
Current demographic trends
Modern Ireland has experienced many of the same demographic changes as other regions of the world. Since the late 1960s, the urban population has been larger than the rural population, with around 1.82 million living in rural areas, compared with 3.26 million in urban ones. More recently, Ireland has also seen a decline in its fertility rate, and the overall number of births. In 2010, for example, there were approximately 72,000 births, but by 2022 this figure had fallen to around 60,700. Despite fewer births in Ireland, population growth has been sustained through net migration, which reached 77,600 in 2023, due to the arrival of 141,600 immigrants, and the departure of just 64,000 emigrants. Although 1.8 million of the population are married, the marriage rate in Ireland was gradually falling before the COVID-19 pandemic, with data for the most recent years likely impacted by the very low number of marriages in 2020 and 2021.Breakdown of Ireland's population
In 2023, the female population of Ireland was approximately 2.67 million, compared with the male population of 2.6 million, with women outnumbering men in every year since 1987. As of the most recent year, there were around one million people aged 14 or under, 667,000 people aged 15-24, 1.45 million aged between 25 and 44, 1.34 million aged 45 and 64, and 806,300 aged 65 and over. The population of Ireland's capital, Dublin including its surrounding areas topped 1.5 million, compared with 1.26 million in 2011. Among Ireland's other regional divisions, the Mid-East region which surrounds County Dublin had a population of over 777,000, followed by the South-West at 757,400, which contains the Republic of Ireland's second-largest city, Cork.
