Changing Ireland - 199 shades of green

The tens of thousands of people expected to visit Ireland next year for The Gathering — the great welcome home festival — will come to a country utterly different to the one they might have left a few short years ago.

It might not be stretching it too far to say that any resemblance between Ireland today and the Ireland of their forefathers is purely coincidental, a fact confirmed by the release of the latest tranche of details from our last census.

In the years between 2002 and 2011 the number of non-Irish nationals, representing 199 nationalities, living in Ireland increased by 143%. Last April’s census recorded 544,357 non-Irish people living here, up from 124,624 in 2006. This welcome influx cannot but change this country fundamentally.