Ireland Population Passes 5 Million For First Time Since 1851, Mid 19th Century Famine

[appalachiablue]

The Guardian, Aug. 31, 2021. Population returns almost to level recorded after famine that killed 1 million and forced millions more to emigrate.

Ireland’s population has surpassed 5 million for the first time since the aftermath of its 19th-century famine.The republic reached the milestone in April, reflecting a combination of net migration and natural increase, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) said on Tuesday.

“Ireland’s population was estimated to be 5.01 million in April 2021, which is the first time the population has risen above 5 million since the 1851 census, when the comparable population was 5.11 million,” said James Hegarty, a statistician with the agency.

The total population on the island of Ireland in 1851 was 6.6 million. Including today’s Northern Ireland population of 1.89 million, the island now has 6.9 million people. For comparison, Wales has 3.1 million people, Scotland 5.4 million and England 56.2 million.

The republic’s population grew by 34,000, or 0.7%, in the year to April. This was smaller than the previous year’s increase of 55,900.. In the 1840s, the island’s population’s exceeded 8 million before a devastating famine killed an estimated 1 million people through hunger and disease and forced millions more to emigrate...

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/31/ireland-population-surpasses-5m-for-first-time-since-1851

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. Wow.

All four of my grandparents came from Ireland at the end of the 19th or beginning of the 20th centuries.

As a a little girl, the elderly aunts would look at me and say (oh, and please hear an Irish brogue here) "Ahh, she has the map of Ireland on her face." Well, I grew up in this wonderful country. And so even if we're only looking at those from Europe, there's a reasonable amount of diversity. Let alone those from the rest of this wonderful planet. Well, okay, my parental generation all married fellow Irish Americans, but still.

Then I made my first trip to Ireland. OMG! Every single person I saw looked EXACTLY like my brothers and sisters and cousins.

This is precisely what I love about living here. I can celebrate my personal ethnicity, and also celebrate other ethnicities. I currently live in Santa Fe, NM, and one of the things I love about living here is that almost every day I get to hear people speaking Spanish. Apparently I have a large A tattooed on my forehead which stands for Anglo, because more than once I've been in line somewhere, and the clerk speaks Spanish to the people in front of me, and immediately switches to English for me. What a lovely thing, to be able to recognized right away the appropriate language. I am honestly in awe of that.

[ret5hd]

2. Kinda OT, but...

spouse and I visited Belgium, and went to some tourist guide booth thing for some directions.

While waiting in line we heard this one guide/tourist assistant/whatever-you-call-him speak Spanish, English, Flemish, German…it was f’ing amazing. He would switch effortlessly…as far as I could tell flawlessly. I only understand English, so I could be wrong on that, but there was no stuttering or pausing or that look where someone REALLY has to think it out.

[Aristus]

3. All that lovely red hair!

[appalachiablue]

4. Ginger World, rocks! Luv it.