More than 65,000 people left Ireland in the 12 months to April, a 6 per cent decrease on the same period a year earlier, according to figures from the Central Statistics Office (CSO).
The period saw 13,500 people leave Ireland to go to Australia, an increase of 27 per cent year on year, and up by 187 per cent on the year to April 2023. This represented the highest level of emigration from Ireland to Australia since 2013, when an estimated 14,100 made the move. Some 6,100 people left Ireland to live in the US in the same period, up 22 per cent on 2024. Some 9,600 people moved to Ireland from the US, up from 4,900 a year earlier. Just under half of the total emigrants, were aged between 25 and 44. Meanwhile, the number of people who immigrated to Ireland fell by 16 per cent in the year to April to 125,300.
Sarah Burns spoke to academics about what was driving the shifts in migration. Prof Mary Gilmartin said the rise in numbers leaving for Australia was largely a post-Covid correction and that figures were returning to “levels that were actually much more common years ago”.
Prof Alan Barrett of the ESRI stressed that what struck him most was that there were almost as many Irish people coming back as leaving the island.
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“While 35,000 Irish people left, 31,500 came back. The notion that younger people or people in general have written off the island, it’s just not in the data,” he says.
Laura Kennedy moved to Australia in recent years and she writes about the impossibility of pleasing everyone when writing about the emigrant experience. However, she has found “writing about the small, seemingly mundane aspects of everyday life that make emigration both joyful and difficult has been a personally helpful way of making sense of the very different yet somehow similar life I now live in Australia.”
Paul Clifford is another Irish arrival Down Under, moving to Melbourne two years ago. He has found the greater emphasis on work-life balance appealing even if the pubs are not a patch on those back home.
This month also saw thousands of students get their Leaving Cert results and CAO offers. Studying abroad has become an option for many. Guy Flouch, the head of Eunicas, which is the Irish agency that supports Irish students seeking places in Europe, reckons there are about 4,000 Irish students doing so. “Moving from Limerick to Dublin as it used to be is now like moving from Ireland to the Netherlands,” Flouch says.
Health correspondent Shauna Bowers spoke to Paddy Davern, a Tipperary GP who moved to Qatar and was shocked by what he found. He says he feels a duty to speak out about what he describes as injustices there.
Meanwhile, columnist and author Quentin Fottrell writes about his experience of moving back to Ireland. “Odd as it seems, the reasons I came back were the same reasons I left: one man’s parochialism is the same man’s community spirit, if viewed from a different vantage point in your life.”
