One in four city people born outside Ireland

Date Published: 26-Apr-2012

By Dara Bradley

The City of the Tribes could just as easily be renamed the ‘City of Blow-Ins’ – a new report shows that fewer than half the population of the city were actually born in Galway City or County.

The latest tranche of statistics taken from the 2011 Census, released yesterday also labels Galway as the most cosmopolitan city in Ireland.

The data shows that 25%, or one in every four residents, enumerated in Galway city on Census night were born outside the state. This is a far greater proportion that Dublin, Waterford, Cork or Limerick and the Census release says Galway is “the most international of the five major cities”.

The report notes that fewer than half (49.3%) of the 76,778 residents of Galway city were actually born in the city or county. In Dublin, almost 70% of the population was born in Dublin, while the same is true of Cork, Limerick and Waterford.

Of the 25% of the residents of Galway that were neither born in Galway or outside the country, 10% are from the surrounding counties of Connacht – Mayo, Roscommon, Leitrim and Sligo – while another 10% approximately were born in Munster.

Cork city appears to be the most insular of Ireland’s five major population centres with over 70% of its residents having been born and bred in Cork. Only a fraction of the population of Cork are made up of residents who were born in Dublin, Leinster, Connacht and the rest of Munster.

For more on this story, see the Galway City Tribune.