Migration flows in both directions

Migration estimates from the CSO have been getting a lot of attention this week.  This is perhaps surprising given that they were published more than seven months ago.  The coverage includes headlines like these from the BBC and RTE.

• BBC: 300,000 Irish people emigrate in four years
• RTE: Survey shows 300,000 people have emigrated from Ireland in past four years

Both of these headlines are wrong and for different reasons.  The 300,000 figure is correct but it does not relate just to Irish people and was not part of the report issued by the National Youth Council of Ireland yesterday.  It is not clear that any of those reporting on the report have actually read it. 

The report is not an estimate of emigration as indicated by the RTE headline.  In fact, the 300,000 figure that has attracted such attention gets a single passing reference in the report (last paragraph of page 13). 

The key contributions of the report are the results of an opinion poll with a 1,000 respondents in Ireland carried out by Red C in October 2012 and a summary of the feedback from 90-minute focus groups of between 7 and 9 Irish emigrants in each of London and Toronto. 

The BBC headline is incorrect because it overstates the number of Irish emigrants over the past four rears by a factor of more than two.  Here is a summary of the migration estimates from the CSO, where the annual data are to the end of April in each year.

The CSO do estimate that 308,900 people have emigrated from Ireland in the past four years but of these 136,600, or 44% were Irish nationals.  On the other side the CSO estimate that 221,500 have immigrated to Ireland over the same time meaning net migration from an outflow of 87,400 over the four years.  For Irish nationals, net migration was an outflow of 55,500 over the four years.

The bad situation for Irish nationals is deteriorating, with almost half of the net outward migration of Irish nationals occurring in the 12 months to April 2012.  This is the opposite pattern for the other large component of the net migration figure, those from the EU accession states in the EU15 to EU27 countries.  For people from these countries, net outward migration has slowed with 70% of the net outflow shown above happening in the first two years, 2009 and 2010.  A table with a breakdown of the data by nationality and year is below the fold.