Ireland

Why Ireland is not the whole island

The state covers about five sixths of the island it is named after, 69,797 square kilometres, with 5,149,139 people counted at the census of 1 April 2022. Its only land border is with the United Kingdom, along the six counties of Northern Ireland in the north-east, and everything else is Atlantic Ocean or Irish Sea.

The capital is Dublin, 592,713 people at the 2022 census, on the east coast facing Britain. The country is low-lying, with a central plain ringed by coastal hills and mountains, and its highest point, Carrauntoohil in the south-west, reaches only 1,039 metres.

Ireland: geography takes up the plain, the coasts, the bogs and the weather that made them.

Why the state took so long to arrive

Ireland spent seven centuries under English and then British rule, beginning with the Norman intervention of the twelfth century and hardening after the conquests and plantations of the sixteenth and seventeenth. The union with Great Britain in 1801 abolished the Irish parliament altogether.

Two events dominate what followed. The Great Famine of the 1840s killed roughly a million people and drove a million more abroad, halving the population over the following decades and establishing emigration as the normal expectation of Irish life for the next century and a half. And the independence struggle of 1916 to 1922 produced a state covering twenty-six of the thirty-two counties, with the remaining six staying in the United Kingdom.

The partition was the unfinished business. The Irish Free State of 1922 became a republic in stages, and the present constitution was enacted by the people on 1 July 1937 and came into operation that December. In Northern Ireland the unresolved question produced three decades of violence from the late 1960s, ended by a settlement in 1998 that both states and both communities accepted. Ireland: history follows the whole sequence.

How the republic is arranged

Ireland is a parliamentary republic under a constitution the electorate approved directly and can only change by referendum. The parliament, the Oireachtas, has two houses. Dáil Éireann is elected by proportional representation using the single transferable vote, in constituencies of at least three seats, and it is where governments are made. Seanad Éireann has sixty members, of whom eleven are nominated by the head of government, six are elected by two universities and forty-three come from vocational panels.

The president is head of state, elected directly for seven years, and the office is largely ceremonial with a small number of real reserve powers, including the ability to refer a bill to the Supreme Court to test its constitutionality. The government itself is limited by the constitution to between seven and fifteen members.

The referendum requirement has made Irish constitutional change unusually visible. Twenty-two amendments have been carried since 1937, including marriage equality in 2015, the regulation of termination of pregnancy in 2018 and the removal of blasphemy from the text in the same year. Two proposals were put and rejected, one of them a plan to abolish the Seanad in 2013. Ireland: politics sets out the institutions and the votes.

Why the economic figures need reading twice

Measured output in 2025 came to 721.7 billion United States dollars, which works out at 131,592 dollars a head. Almost none of that comparison means what it appears to mean.

The Irish statistical office publishes a second measure, modified gross national income, designed specifically to strip out the effects of foreign-owned corporate structures. It stood at 334 billion euros in 2025, which is 55.4% of gross domestic product. Rather less than half the measured output of the Irish economy corresponds to income actually available to it, and the gap is the accounting of intellectual property and leased aircraft held here by companies that produce elsewhere.

The underlying economy is a genuinely rich one all the same. Unemployment stood at 4.6% in 2025 and inflation at 2.2%, income is distributed moderately evenly at a Gini coefficient of 29 in 2023, and life expectancy reached 83 years in 2024. What the headline figures conceal is not poverty but a division: multinational productivity at the top of the international range, domestic firms far below it. Ireland: economy works through both.

What the culture holds on to

Irish is the national and first official language under the constitution, and English is the language almost everyone actually uses. At the 2022 census 1,873,997 people aged three and over said they could speak Irish, which is 40.4% of those answering the question, while 71,968 said they spoke it daily outside the education system. That gap between competence and use is the central fact of Irish language policy.

The literary record is out of proportion to the population, in both languages, and so is the traditional music, which survived as a living practice rather than as a revival. The country holds only two properties on the UNESCO World Heritage List, Brú na Bóinne on the Boyne, inscribed in 1993, and the monastic island of Sceilg Mhichíl, inscribed in 1996, which understates the archaeology considerably.

Religion once organised Irish public life almost completely and no longer does. The referendums of the past fifteen years are the clearest measure of how fast that changed. Ireland: culture works through the language, the music, the writing and the shift.

Who comes and what they come for

Just over 6.4 million foreign visitors completed a trip to Ireland in 2025, down 3% on the previous year, staying 47.9 million nights and spending an estimated 5.5 billion euros. The average stay was 7.5 nights, which is long by European standards and reflects how far most visitors have travelled.

Great Britain supplied 38% of them, continental Europe 33%, North America 24% and the rest of the world 5%. Only 40% came primarily for holidays; 35% came to visit friends and relatives, which is the diaspora returning, and 15% came for business.

That composition shapes the destinations. The west and south-west coasts carry the scenery, Dublin carries the arrivals and the business, and a substantial share of visitors are staying in houses rather than hotels and going wherever their relatives live. Ireland: travel covers the routes and the practicalities.