Non-Irish citizens make up 10 percent of Mayo’s population

NON-Irish citizens now make up 10 percent of Mayo’s population, according to the latest census figures.

Among the non-Irish residents living in Mayo during the last census, the largest group were UK citizens (3,898 people) followed by Polish citizens (2,131), Lithuanian (819) and Indian (562).

This is slightly below that national percentage of 12 percent of non-Irish citizens living in the state.

There were also 3,854 people living in Mayo in April 2022 who had moved to the county in the year before the census.

This included 2,044 people who had moved from elsewhere within Ireland, and 1,810 people from outside the State.

A further 3,871 people had moved within the county in the year before the census.

Ballyhaunis remains Mayo’s most ethnically diverse town, with 1,374 of its 2,773 population born outside of Ireland.

Claremorris also recorded an ethnically diverse population, with at 1,205 of its 3,857-population born outside the country.

A total of 1,575 people recorded in Census 2022 as living in Westport town were born outside the state, out of a population of 6,872.

In Castlebar, 3,565 out of a population of 13,054 were born outside of Ireland, the largest cohort (1,098) being from ‘Rest of World’.

Of the 13,348 people who spoke foreign languages, 6,832 (51.82 percent) said they could speak English ‘very well’ while 1,826 said they could speak English ‘not well’ while 403 said they could not speak English at all.

There were 1,294 Travellers in Mayo in Census 2022, compared with 1,299 in 2016.

Eighty percent of the county’s population, more than 109,800 people, said they were Catholic. This was down from 87 percent in Census 2016.

Mayo still has a comparatively high Catholic population, with 69 percent of people in the entire state professing to be Catholics.

The other most common religions in Mayo included Church of Ireland (2,584 people), Islam (1,653) and Orthodox (1,312).

There were more than 13,400 people in Mayo who stated they did not have a religion, which jumped 77 percent on the 7,600 who said they had no religion in the 2016 Census.