Almost seven million people visited Ireland last year and nearly half a million travelled here in December, according to statistics released by the Central Statistics Office yesterday.
Overseas visits to Ireland have risen steadily since 2001, from just under six million, with a 6 per cent increase since 2004.
Visitors from continental Europe grew by almost 20 per cent while British visitors were up by almost 4 per cent to 3.8 million in 2005, from just over 3.5 million in the previous year.
However numbers of visitors from North America have fallen from a five-year high of 976,700 in 2004, to 950,800 last year.
Visitors from other areas of the world, such as Asia, Japan and New Zealand, also dropped by 8.5 per cent.
The trends echo figures released by Tourism Ireland at the beginning of January.
Last year also saw an increase in Irish residents travelling abroad, from 5.4 million in 2004 to 6.1 million last year. The increase, of 12.8 per cent, represented the largest year-on-year increase in the last five years.
However, a breakdown of the destinations of Irish people travelling abroad is not included in the survey.
The CSO study is conducted at Dublin, Cork, Shannon, Knock and Kerry airports as well as at the ports of Dublin, Dún Laoghaire, Rosslare and Ringaskiddy. A sample of flights and sailings are surveyed.
In December, 45,000 passengers were surveyed for country of residence.
August was the busiest month last year with almost 880,000 visitors travelling to Ireland, over half of these came from Britain. January was the quietest, with visitor numbers reaching 378,100.
US visitors showed a preference for July, with 118,400 arriving, while February proved to be the least popular.
The Baltic countries showed little preference for Irish summers, with almost the same number visiting in June as in December.
Paul O'Toole, chief executive of Tourism Ireland, said they were pleased with the overall 6 per cent increase in overseas visitor numbers last year, particularly when benchmarked against Western Europe where projected growth rate in 2005 was 4.3 per cent.
"This performance was underpinned by an excellent performance from Europe and a positive performance from the British market where we put considerable focus and investment last year," he said.
Tourism Ireland was reviewing North American and long-haul markets in light of the decline in numbers.
"The real measure of performance is undoubtedly how individual enterprises, sectors and regions fare and, for some of these, the going was tough last year," Mr O'Toole added.
Prospects looked good for 2006, particularly because Ireland would be hosting the Ryder Cup golf competition between Europe and the US.
