The non-profit sector - including health services, schools and colleges - employs more than 125,000 people, according to a report published yesterday by the National College of Ireland.
The figure makes it the fifth biggest sector in the State, employing more people than the building industry and the financial services industry. The sector also has 34,000 unpaid volunteers, mostly in social services, culture and recreation.
The authors, Freda Donoghue, Helmut Anheier and Lester Salamon, estimate that these volunteers save the sector and the State £471 million a year in wages.
"In the context of media trumpeting about the importance of the financial services sector and our Celtic Tiger economy - which had begun roaring in 1995 (the year on which the figures are based) - it is relevant to note that non-profit paid employment exceeds paid employment in insurance, financial and business services," they write. "Furthermore, once volunteering is added in, employment in the non-profit sector is more than twice as great as in those services."
Non-profit organisations derive their income mainly from the public sector, which contributes 75 per cent of their financing.
Fees contribute 15 per cent and fund-raising only 10 per cent but, at that figure, giving through fund-raising is higher in Ireland than in the EU on average (7 per cent). "Our image of ourselves as a nation of givers now has some empirical basis, even if the level of individual donations in recent years has not kept pace with our booming economy," say the authors.
Education and health are the largest components of the non-profit sector, the report says. They receive three-quarters of the cash income of the sector and employ over three-quarters of the paid employees in the sector.
Indeed the relative size of the sector in Ireland is greater than in many other EU countries. "Paid employment, at 12.2 per cent of the non-agricultural workforce, means that the Irish non-profit sector is the second biggest employer after the Dutch non-profit sector," the authors write.