People from 188 different countries were living in the State at the time of the last census in 2006, new figures show.
Of the 420,000 non-Irish people residing here on census day in April 2006, the largest group was UK nationals, who numbered 112,000. Poles were the second-largest group, followed by Lithuanians, Nigerians and Latvians.
The top ten countries accounted for 82 per cent of the total non-Irish population, and there were 44 countries – from Anguilla to Western Sahara – represented by fewer than 10 people.
The report of the non-Irish population, released today by the Central Statistics Office (CSO), also shows that people from countries outside Europe had higher overall educational attainment than Irish people in the same age brackets.
In general, foreign nationals were concentrated either in cities, particularly Dublin and Galway, or in the popular tourist destinations on the western and southern seaboards. Leitrim, Longford, Waterford city and county, Carlow and North Tipperary all had fewer than 5,000 foreigners, while Dublin City, Fingal, South Dublin and Cork County all had more than 20,000.
The study confirms that the non-Irish population had a strikingly different demographic profile to that of the Irish. Non-Irish groups were dominated by people in their 20s and 30s, with significantly more men than women. There were few children and older people among the non-Irish population.
The housing profile of the non-Irish was very different to that of the Irish. While owner occupancy is most common among Irish and UK-headed households, almost 80 per cent of households headed by people from countries that joined the EU since 2004 were renting.
Given the overall impression of the non-Irish being generally young and single, the authors note that it is surprising to find that almost 42 per cent were married, compared with 46 per cent for the Irish population. Nearly four per cent of the non-Irish were re-married, compared with just under one per cent of Irish people, reflecting the relatively recent introduction of divorce in Ireland.
The report also sketches individual profiles of the 10 largest non-Irish groups. These show that two thirds of all Chinese were living in the greater Dublin area, compared with fewer than one in five Latvians, who favoured large and medium sized towns instead.
The Chinese and the French had the highest proportion of single people (69 per cent and 71 per cent respectively), while two thirds of Nigerians and Filipinos were married.
Polish men had the highest percentage at work (91 per cent) while over 1 in 5 Nigerian men were unemployed.
