Ireland’s demograpics shaped by migration.

ANALYSIS: IRELAND IS the only territory in the world in which the population today is smaller than it was two centuries ago. Migration is the reason for this unique decline. Coinciding with the beginning of the first era of globalisation, the Famine caused a tradition of emigration to arise that changed this island forever.

If outflows of people have made Ireland stand out from all other countries over two centuries, the pattern of arrivals over the past decade has made it exceptional among its European peers.

Almost one in eight people resident here last year was not Irish. That is more than double the proportion a decade ago and far above the proportion in pre-Celtic tiger times.

By the standards of the rest of Europe, Ireland was one of the most homogeneous societies in the early 1990s. By last year it had become one of the continent’s most heterogeneous countries…