November the 29th, 2024 – The Emerald Isle appears to no longer be the promised land for Croats as 17,000 Croatian citizens return home from Ireland.
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, anti-immigrant sentiment has taken hold in Ireland, and only 526 Croatian citizens immigrated there the first nine months of this year. Today, only about 16-17,000 Croats live in that country. That’s only half of the Croats out of the approximately 34,000 who have received an Irish PPS number (the counterpart to the Croatian OIB) over the past 20 years.
Regarding the drastic decrease in Croatian citizens who have emigrated to Ireland, demographer Professor Nenad Pokos claimed that the Irish census from 2022 recorded 13,649 Croatian citizens. Although a different methodology was applied in that census, with citizenship being taken into account and no longer the country of birth. Owing to that, it’s widely believed that significantly more Croats lived in Ireland in 2022 than the number determined by the census. This, he claimed, is indicated by the data on the number of requests for the PPS (Personal Public Service Number) that is assigned to each resident who has immigrated to Ireland.
The number of Croats who received a PPS between 2011 (when, according to the census, there were only 980 Croatian-born residents in Ireland) and 2022 stood at 29,356. The Croatian Ambassador to Dublin, Dr. Davor Vidiš, estimates that there are between 16-17,000 Croatian citizens currently living in Ireland, and half of them have mostly returned to Croatia. Others have gone elsewhere in the EU, according to Večernji list.
“The difference between the population census and the estimate of the number of Croats in Ireland is in those who haven’t regulated their status/residence, those who come temporarily and occasionally, those who aren’t registered and who don’t want to be registered in Ireland for various reasons,” explained Vidiš.
The increased immigration of Croats to Ireland began after Croatia joined the EU in the summer of 2013. In 2014, Pokos revealed, 2,224 Croatian citizens immigrated to Ireland. In 2015 4,342 of them did the same, and in 2016 the highest number, as many as 5,312, was recorded. Following 2016, the number of Croatian citizens going to Ireland slightly decreased, especially during the coronavirus pandemic.
“Even after the pandemic ended, the number of Croats in Ireland in 2022 stood at 1,823, and in 2023, only 1,212 Croatian citizens immigrated to Ireland. That’s the lowest number in the last ten years. In the first nine months of this year, only 526 Croats received PPS, so it can be expected that in the whole of 2024, around 700 of Croatian citizens will immigrate to Ireland.
Although Croats made up 4.9% of all foreign immigrants in 2016, they fell to seventh place that year in terms of numbers because they were surpassed by Italians. However, in the first nine months of 2024, Croats fell to 36th place in terms of the total number of immigrants,” said Pokos.
In Ireland, which is being shaken by a housing crisis, anti-immigrant sentiment is growing, and a significant part of the Irish are concerned about preserving their Irish identity.
