Ireland's population highest for 144 years

DUBLIN - Ireland's population climbed to its highest level for 144 years in April as emigration slowed to a trickle, reversing more than a century of departures due to famine, poverty and unemployment.

The Central Statistics Office estimated on Wednesday that Ireland's total population in April 2005 stood at 4.13 million -- the highest figure since 1861 when the census of that year recorded a population of 4.4 million.

The population increased by 87,000 or 2.2 per cent compared with the previous April, the CSO said in its Population and Migration Estimates report.

It said the total immigration flow into Ireland in the 12 months to April was around 70,000, the highest level since 1987, while emigrants numbered 16,600, the lowest figure since 1987.

The natural increase -- births less deaths -- was 33,500, it said.

Ireland has long been used to seeing its citizens leave to seek better lives elsewhere.

In the 1840s more than a million emigrated, mainly to North America, due to the country's devastating potato famine in which about a million people died of starvation.

Emigration continued due to economic hardship over the next century and by the 1960s the population had slumped to a low of 2.8 million -- half of what it was 120 years earlier.

In the past decade, however, Ireland has become a beacon for immigrants, attracted by job opportunities spawned by the country's unprecedented "Celtic Tiger" economic boom.

Many Irish nationals who left during the economic doldrums of the 1980s have also returned.

The CSO said more than a third of immigrants in the year to April were nationals of the 10 new European Union accession states which joined the EU in May 2004.

- REUTERS