Data shows more than two million tourists came to Ireland in the past three months

New Central Statistics Office figures show the number of overseas visitors to Ireland is up by almost a fifth.

That means an extra 345,000 tourists came here in the last three months, compared to this time last year.

The 19.2% increase means that there were 2,201,100 overseas tourists in Ireland between September and November of this year.

Almost a million people arrived from the UK, more than 700,000 traveled from mainland Europe and nearly 400,000 came from North America.

Meanwhile,1.7 million Irish residents went abroad, that is a jump of more than 4%.