This article is from page 17 of the 2012-10-09 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 17 JPG
NEARLY half of Clare’s population was born outside the county, a new set of statistics relating to the 2011 National Census of Population have revealed this week.
The figures released by the Central Statistics Office in its ‘Migration and Diversity – A profile of diversity in Ireland’ report have been broken down into seven different categories – those born in Clare, those born in counties in the State outside Clare, those born in Northern Ireland, England, Walsh, Scotland, the United States and also a category for other countries.
Accordint to the census returns 60,174 people who are resident in Clare were born in the county, a figure that translates into 51.3 per cent of the county’s total population of 117,196, with the remaining 57,022 born outside the county.
The majority of these are made of up people who were born in other counties in the State – 36,863 in total which account for 31.45 per cent of the population. This large number of Irish nationals born outside the county can largely be attributed to the fact that Clare has been with a maternity hospital services for over a quarter of a century, a state of affairs that seen most of the county’s births taking place in Limerick and Galway.
British subjects make up the largest category of Clare residents born outside the country. A total of 7,529 were born in either England or Wales, 971 in Northern Ireland and 345 in Scotland. This mean that British nationals, which number 8,845 in total, make up 7.5 per cent of Clare’s population.
There are 1,732 American citizens resident in the county, a figure that translates into 1.5 per cent of the county’s population, while residents who were born in other countries number 9, 582, which represents a percentage of 8.1.