Irish Emigration & the Irish Around the World

About 10 million people have left Ireland over the centuries, and around 70 million people worldwide claim Irish descent. Why they left, where they went, what the numbers actually mean, and where you can still walk into the story, in Ireland and abroad.

Last checked October 2026

If you read nothing else

• About 10 million people have left Ireland over the centuries. That is the figure used by EPIC, the Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin, which exists to tell their story.
• The headline diaspora figure, around 70 million people worldwide who are Irish-born or of Irish descent, is an estimate by Ireland's Department of Foreign Affairs, not a census count. It includes everyone with Irish ancestry who claims it, several generations deep. Treat it as a measure of reach, not a headcount.
• The biggest single community is in the United States: 32.4 million US residents, 9.5% of the population, reported Irish ancestry in the US Census Bureau's 2024 American Community Survey. That is a self-reported ancestry figure: it measures identity, not birthplace. Only about 117,000 US residents were actually born in Ireland.
• The flow now runs both ways. Ireland today has strongly positive net migration overall, and in the year to April 2025 some 31,500 Irish citizens came home (CSO figures), even as Irish citizens continued to leave in similar numbers. Our Coming Home guide is for them.
• The story is visitable. EPIC in Dublin, the Jeanie Johnston famine ship on the Liffey, the Dunbrody Famine Ship in New Ross, and the Cobh Heritage Centre let you stand inside the emigrant story in Ireland. Grosse Île in Canada, Ellis Island in New York, and Irish place names from Newfoundland to Argentina carry it abroad.

This page deals in estimates more than most on our site, because emigration statistics are estimates by nature. Every figure below is attributed to its source and year, and where sources disagree we say so. Ancestry, birthplace and citizenship are three different measurements. We label which one each number is.

1. How to read the numbers (read this before quoting any of them)

Three different things get called "the Irish abroad," and they differ by orders of magnitude:

• Irish-born people living abroad: an actual, countable group. The UN's 2024 estimate puts the Irish-born living outside Ireland at roughly 714,000, with the largest groups in the UK, the US and Australia.
• Irish citizens abroad: bigger, because it includes people born abroad who hold Irish citizenship through a parent or grandparent. Ireland's own "Ireland in Brief" has put this at more than one million.
• People of Irish ancestry/descent: the big number. This is what censuses in the US, Canada and Australia measure by self-report: you are counted if you say your ancestry is Irish, however many generations back. This is where the Department of Foreign Affairs' estimate of around 70 million worldwide comes from.

None of these is "the wrong number." They answer different questions. On this page, every figure is labelled with which question it answers.

2. The story in movements

Before the Famine: soldiers, servants and the Ulster exodus

Irish emigration did not begin with the Famine. From the 1600s, Irish soldiers (the "Wild Geese" tradition), servants and traders were leaving for Europe and the Americas. One of the earliest sustained flows was to Newfoundland: from around 1675, ships from England's West Country called at ports along Ireland's south coast to collect provisions and servants for the transatlantic fishery. The migration was seasonal at first, young men working a summer or two, and grew to a peak in the 1770s–80s when, by the count of the Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage project, more than 100 ships and 5,000 men a year cleared Irish ports for the fishery. Permanent settlement followed.

The largest pre-Famine movement crossed the Atlantic from the north: between about 1717 and 1775, an estimated 200,000–250,000 people left Ulster for the American colonies. Most of them were Presbyterian descendants of Scottish and English settlers (the "Scotch-Irish" or Ulster Scots), driven out by rising rents, expiring leases, drought and the legal disadvantages Presbyterians faced under the Penal Laws. They landed at Philadelphia and New Castle, pushed into the backcountry and down the Great Wagon Road into the Carolinas and Appalachia. America has been partly Irish-built since before it was America.

Through the early 1800s the flow widened: labourers to build Britain's canals and America's infrastructure, settlers to Canada, with roughly another million leaving for the United States and Canada in the three decades before 1845. Then the potato failed.

1845–1852: the Famine exodus

The 1841 census counted 8,175,124 people on the island of Ireland. That is still, today, the highest population Ireland has ever recorded. When potato blight destroyed the crop on which millions depended, beginning in 1845, the result was catastrophe: roughly one million people died of hunger and disease during the Great Famine (An Gorta Mór, 1845–1852), and more than a million emigrated during the Famine years themselves. Historians' estimates for the wider exodus run higher: at least 2.1 million left Ireland between 1845 and 1855, one of the largest departures from a single island in proportion to its population in recorded history. (All Famine figures are estimates, records were kept by a state in crisis, and honest sources give ranges. The figures above are the widely used ones; see the sources list.)

Many crossed on ships already notorious in their own time as "coffin ships": overcrowded, under-provisioned vessels where typhus and dysentery spread through passengers already weakened by hunger. The worst single passage was to Canada in 1847: nearly 100,000 people, most of them fleeing the Famine, sailed for Canada that year, and more than 5,000 of them were buried on Grosse Île, the quarantine island in the St Lawrence (Parks Canada's figure; the island's memorial cross records 5,424 burials). Thousands more died at sea and in Canadian cities that summer.

Two ships tell the other side of the story, and you can board both. The Jeanie Johnston, a Tralee-owned barque, made 16 emigrant voyages between 1848 and 1855 carrying some 2,500 people to Quebec, Baltimore and New York. Exceptionally for a Famine ship, she never lost a passenger, a record credited to her captain, James Attridge, who refused to overload her, and to her ship's doctor, Richard Blennerhassett. Her full-scale replica is moored on the Liffey in Dublin. The Dunbrody, a replica of an 1845 emigrant barque at New Ross, Co. Wexford, recreates the standard voyage (the cramped 'tween decks, the rations, the lottery of arrival) that the Jeanie Johnston's passengers were lucky to soften.

And emigration did not stop when the Famine ended. It became a system: farms passed intact to one heir, and the other children left; passages were prepaid by relatives already abroad; letters home (the "American letters") recruited the next sailing. By 1901 the island's population had fallen to about 4.4 million, barely half the 1841 figure. EPIC's summary is the simplest: over the centuries, some 10 million people have left the island of Ireland, more than live on it today.

The long goodbye: post-war Britain

Independence in 1922 did not end emigration; it changed its main destination. From the 1930s onward, roughly three-quarters of Irish emigrants went to Great Britain. The peak decade was the 1950s, when a stagnant economy drove out more than 400,000 people (some estimates run toward half a million): Irish workers rebuilt war-damaged British cities, staffed the new National Health Service, and filled the building sites of London, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow. Britain's Irish-born population peaked at the 1961 census (per the Office for National Statistics) and has been in slow decline ever since, as that generation ages. But the community they built, and their British-born children and grandchildren, remain one of the largest Irish communities on earth (section 3).

The 1980s: the graduate wave

When Ireland's economy contracted again in the 1980s, emigration surged once more: the CSO records net emigration of more than 185,000 across the decade. In the peak years, tens of thousands were leaving annually. Contemporary accounts stress how this wave differed from the 1950s: the leavers were younger and, on average, far more highly educated, graduates as well as builders, and while Britain was again the biggest destination, the US, Europe and Australia all took a share. Some of this generation never came back; many did, in the 1990s, when the flow reversed and Ireland recorded positive net migration in 1996 for the first time in the modern era.

Today: a two-way street

The modern pattern is circulation, not exile:

• The post-2008 crash produced one more wave (the CSO records about 110,000 more departures than arrivals between 2010 and 2014), and net migration has been positive overall since 2015. Ireland is now a country of immigration as well as emigration, and its population, 5,458,600 in April 2025, is the highest of the modern state.
• But Irish citizens still leave, and, the part that would have astonished earlier generations, they also come back in large numbers. In the year to April 2025 (CSO), 31,500 returning Irish citizens immigrated, while total emigration from Ireland was 65,600 people of all nationalities.
• The destinations have globalised: alongside Britain and the US, today's Irish start over in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the Gulf states and across the EU, often on working-holiday and skilled visas, often with a return ticket mentally pencilled in.

If you are one of the ones coming back, our Coming Home guide covers the practical side: paperwork, schools, healthcare, and the emotional weather of returning.

3. Where the Irish are traced today

United States: the giant

• 32.4 million US residents (9.5% of the population) reported Irish ancestry in the 2024 American Community Survey (US Census Bureau): self-reported ancestry. 116,641 residents were born in Ireland.
• The largest Irish-American county is Cook County, Illinois (Chicago), with 436,577 people claiming Irish ancestry in 2024. The great historic gateways (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago) still anchor the map.
• And then there is Butte, Montana: an old copper-mining city where, in the 2010 census, around a quarter of the population (23.6% in the commonly cited figure) reported Irish ancestry. That is the highest share of any US metro or micro area in that census, built by miners who came from Cork, Kerry, Donegal and beyond to work the Anaconda mines.

Britain: the near abroad

• The 2021 census counted 523,014 people born on the island of Ireland living in England and Wales: 324,670 born in the Republic and most of the rest in Northern Ireland. The ONS notes the Republic-born figure has fallen 20% since 2011 and has been declining since its 1961 peak, as the post-war generation passes.
• Identity outlasts birthplace: 507,465 people in England and Wales identified as "White Irish" in the 2021 census, and 364,725 held an Irish passport, including many British-born people who claimed citizenship through Irish parents or grandparents.
• The historic heartlands (London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow) remain the community's centres, served by Irish centres, county associations and GAA clubs that in some cases date to the 19th century.

Canada: the northern shore

• 4.4 million Canadians reported Irish as an ethnic or cultural origin in the 2021 census (Statistics Canada): one of the largest origin groups in the country. The Ireland-born immigrant population is much smaller (29,300 in the 2021 census), because most Irish-Canadian ancestry arrived in the 19th century.
• Newfoundland is the special case: settled largely from Waterford and the south-east of Ireland in the 1700s–1800s, its people were, by the census of 1836, half Irish or of Irish descent. Irish speech survived there into living memory, the local English dialect still carries Munster music in it, and place names like Ballyhack, Cappahayden and Kilbride map the connection. In the 2016 census, 20.7% of Newfoundland and Labrador residents still claimed Irish ancestry.
• Grosse Île and the Irish Memorial National Historic Site (Parks Canada), in the St Lawrence near Quebec City, is the Canadian anchor visit: the quarantine station where, in 1847, more than 5,000 Famine emigrants were buried.

Australia: the far shore

• 2,410,833 Australians, 9.5% of the population, reported Irish ancestry in the 2021 census (Australian Bureau of Statistics), making Irish the third most reported ancestry after English and Australian.
• The Australian story has a harder start than most: from the 1790s to the 1860s, many Irish arrived as transported convicts, a story the Cobh exhibition tells from the Irish end (convict ships sailed from Cobh). Free emigrants followed in far greater numbers during and after the Famine, and Irish-Australians became central to the new country's churches, unions, police forces and politics.

Argentina: the Spanish-speaking Irish

• Argentina is home to what is commonly described as the largest Irish community in the non-English-speaking world. Ireland's Department of Foreign Affairs records up to 40,000 Irish emigrants to the River Plate region, mostly in the second half of the 19th century, mainly from the midlands (Westmeath, Longford, Offaly) and Wexford, drawn by sheep farming and the chance to own land on the pampas.
• Their descendants are usually estimated at around 500,000 or more. Treat the figure as an estimate, as Argentine censuses do not count ancestry.
• The community's towering figure is Admiral William Brown, born in Foxford, Co. Mayo, in 1777, founder of the Argentine Navy and a national hero: an entire Buenos Aires district (Almirante Brown) and a class of destroyers carry his name. The community still publishes its own newspaper, The Southern Cross, and plays Gaelic games at the Hurling Club in Buenos Aires (per the DFA).

New Zealand: the small, deep footprint

• New Zealand's census measures ethnic identity rather than ancestry: 17,835 people identified as Irish in the 2018 census (Te Ara / Stats NZ), and about 15,300 residents were born on the island of Ireland (10,494 in the Republic, 4,806 in Northern Ireland). It is often said that around one in six New Zealanders has Irish heritage. That is a widely repeated estimate, but one the Embassy of Ireland's own research notes has yet to be confirmed statistically. The Irish settled across Auckland, Canterbury and the West Coast goldfields, and modern skilled migration, including workers who rebuilt Christchurch after the 2011 earthquakes, has renewed the flow.

South Africa and the newer hubs

• Ireland's embassy in Pretoria estimates around 35,000 Irish citizens across the southern African countries it covers, with communities in South Africa and Zimbabwe supported by Irish societies and cultural groups.
• The newest map of the Irish abroad is drawn less by ancestry than by the GAA: the Association counts more than 500 clubs outside Ireland, including county boards across the Middle East (Dubai, Abu Dhabi and their neighbours), Asia and continental Europe. These are communities formed by today's working-holiday and professional emigrants, which fold back into the older story every time a new arrival finds their county's jersey waiting for them on the other side of the world.

4. Traces you can visit

In Ireland: start where they started

• EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum, Dublin: the anchor visit. Twenty themed galleries in the vaults of the CHQ Building on Custom House Quay, in the docklands from which so many emigrants sailed, telling the story of the ~10 million who left and what they did in the world. EPIC also houses the Irish Family History Centre, where genealogy consultations can start (or unstick) a family search. Pair it with our Irish surnames page and the 1926 Census guide.
• The Jeanie Johnston, Custom House Quay, Dublin: board the replica Famine barque a few minutes' walk from EPIC and hear why her passengers were the lucky ones (section 2).
• Dunbrody Famine Ship Experience, New Ross, Co. Wexford: the replica emigrant ship and exhibition on the quay from which many Wexford emigrants sailed.
• Cobh Heritage Centre tells the Queenstown Story in the old Victorian railway station at Deepwater Quay. Millions embarked from here when the town was Queenstown, Ireland's great emigration port: Famine emigration, transportation to Australia, and the port's Titanic and Lusitania connections. Our Cobh town page has the visit details, and the Annie Moore statue on the quay (she was the first immigrant processed at Ellis Island in 1892) faces her twin statue across the Atlantic.

Abroad: the story's other end

• Grosse Île, Quebec (Parks Canada): the quarantine island and its Celtic cross memorial to the 5,424 buried there from 1847.
• Ellis Island, New York: where Annie Moore of Cork was the first arrival processed on 1 January 1892.
• Newfoundland's Irish shore: the Avalon Peninsula's southern shore communities, where the surnames (Power, Walsh, Murphy, Ryan) and the accent both point back to Waterford city and county.
• Buenos Aires: Admiral Brown's city: his tomb is in La Recoleta Cemetery, and St Patrick's Day is celebrated by one of the world's oldest Irish communities outside the English-speaking world.
• Any GAA club, anywhere: with 500+ clubs outside Ireland (GAA/DFA figure), from New York and London to Sydney and Dubai, there is a fair chance that wherever you land, someone is training on a weekday evening under lights, speaking your county's name. The GAA abroad is not a museum piece; it is the diaspora's living room.
• Irish pubs: handle with affection and a little honesty. The pub exported worldwide is a 19th-century emigrant institution (part bar, part bank, part labour exchange, part letter-box from home), and the good ones abroad still function exactly that way for new arrivals. The décor may be packaged; the function is real.

Place names: the quietest traces are on the map itself: Ballyhack and Kilbride in Newfoundland; the Almirante Brown district in Buenos Aires; the many Dublins, Belfasts, Corks, Waterfords and Limericks scattered across the US, Canada and Australia by people naming a new place after the one that made them.

Sources

• Department of Foreign Affairs (Ireland): Global Ireland: Ireland's Diaspora Strategy 2020–2025 launch (the "around 70 million people… Irish-born or of Irish descent" estimate): dfa.ie; and Ireland in Brief (Irish Abroad: "more than one million Irish citizens… living abroad… as many as 70 million… can claim Irish descent").
• UN DESA migrant stock, 2024, via the Prague Process Ireland country profile (Irish-born abroad: 714,405; largest in UK, US, Australia).
• CSO (Central Statistics Office, Ireland): Population and Migration Estimates, April 2025 (31,500 returning Irish citizens; total emigration 65,600; population 5,458,600) and April 2024 (30,000 returning Irish citizens; 34,700 Irish emigrants); Ireland and the EU at 50 (1980s net emigration of more than 185,000); Census 1841 total of 8,175,124 for the island.
• EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum: "Over the centuries, some 10 million people have left the island of Ireland"; 20 themed galleries; Irish Family History Centre: epicchq.com; DFA EPIC profile.
• US Census Bureau: Irish-American Heritage Month and St. Patrick's Day: March 2026 (facts from the 2024 American Community Survey 1-year estimates: 32.4 million / 9.5% Irish ancestry; 116,641 Ireland-born; Cook County 436,577): census.gov.
• Butte, Montana: 2010 census Irish-ancestry share (23.6%, highest of US metro/micro areas), as reported from census data.
• Office for National Statistics (UK): Census 2021: Demography and international migration (Ireland-born in England & Wales down from 407,000 in 2011 to 325,000 in 2021; peak in 1961); University of Nottingham / Irish in Britain analysis of Census 2021 (523,014 born on the island of Ireland in England & Wales; 507,465 identifying as White Irish; 364,725 Irish passport holders).
• Statistics Canada: 2021 Census ethnic or cultural origins (Irish: 4.4 million) and immigrant population by place of birth (Ireland: 29,300); 2016 Census for Newfoundland and Labrador Irish ancestry (20.7%).
• Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage Web Site (Memorial University): "The Irish in Newfoundland" (fishery migration from c.1675; 1770s–80s peak of 5,000+ men a year; 1836 census: the Irish and their offspring composed half the population): heritage.nf.ca.
• Parks Canada: Grosse Île and the Irish Memorial National Historic Site (quarantine station 1832–1937; in 1847 nearly 100,000 sailed for Canada, mostly fleeing the Famine; more than 5,000 buried on the island; memorial inscription records 5,424): pc.gc.ca.
• Australian Bureau of Statistics: 2021 Census QuickStats, Australia (Irish ancestry: 2,410,833 responses, 9.5%): abs.gov.au.
• Department of Foreign Affairs (Ireland), Embassy in Argentina: Irish Argentina (up to 40,000 emigrants to the River Plate, mainly from the midlands and Wexford; Admiral William Brown of Foxford; The Southern Cross newspaper; Gaelic games at the Hurling Club): dfa.ie.
• Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand / Stats NZ: Irish: Facts and figures (Irish ethnic identity 17,835 in 2018; Ireland-born residents by jurisdiction); Embassy of Ireland / University of Otago study of the Irish in New Zealand (2018 Irish ethnic population 17,817; "one in six" heritage estimate noted as unconfirmed).
• Department of Foreign Affairs (Ireland), Embassy in South Africa: Irish community in Southern Africa (an estimated 35,000 Irish citizens across the embassy's accredited countries): dfa.ie.
• GAA / Department of Foreign Affairs: Global Games Development Fund announcements ("over 500 clubs… outside of Ireland"; "500+ clubs providing football, hurling and camogie outside of Ireland"): gaa.ie.
• Jeanie Johnston: 16 voyages 1848–1855, ~2,500 emigrants, no passenger lost; replica in Dublin: Jeanie Johnston Tall Ship visitor materials and contemporary reporting of her 2025 return to berth.
• Cobh Heritage Centre: "The Queenstown Story" exhibition (emigration from the 1600s to the 1950s; Famine, transportation to Australia, Titanic and Lusitania): Cobh Heritage Centre and tour listings.
• Famine-era departure totals ("at least 2.1 million left Ireland, 1845–1855"; population of about 4.4 million by 1901): standard historical summaries of the Great Famine drawing on CSO census data; Europeana / national museum educational materials for 1950s emigration scale (400,000+).

Written by the Irish Escapes team. Emigration statistics are republished by their sources on census and annual cycles; we re-check this page when the CSO and the major census bureaus release new figures. The "Last checked" date at the top is the date of the most recent full check.