Will Irish people eventually become a minority in their own country?

Answer 1

No they won't. New people come into countries all the time, but over that time they become part of the nation. The Irish people are made up of people that came to Ireland since people first inhabited it. They mainly came from other parts of Europe and down through history people have come from many places and they make what is now considered to be the Irish people. Genetically, they can be traced back to all the places that they came from. So in one sense you could say that there is no such thing as the "Irish people" as the people that live on the island of Ireland are all descended from people who came from other places and have been coming to Ireland over thousands of years.

That is the same for any country in the world. If you pick any country, in it you will find people who are descended from people from other places. There are people all around the world that are descended from Irish people, but they are now natives of their home countries. In the years, centuries and millennia to come, this process will continue all over the world. So the people that will be in Ireland in a thousand years from now, will still be considered to be Irish. It is the same that people that are today considered to be Irish have ancestors, maybe just a few generations back, that came from other countries, but those people are now Irish. Your question could have been asked at any time in the past, and since then new people have come to Ireland, to make up the current Irish people. The answer would still be the same. The Irish can never become a minority in their own country. As they have always done, since the moment the first settlers arrived thousands of years ago, the Irish will continue to change. What an Irish person is today is different than 100 years ago or 200 years ago or 500 years ago or 1000 years ago, but the people at any of those times, like the people in the future will be, are Irish. There is a common historical phrase in Ireland talking about people coming to Ireland as becoming "more Irish than the Irish themselves." That sums it up perfectly.

An alternate view:

Contrary to the above contribution, an Irish person of any recent modern period remained largely unchanged, genetically, from their forebears for the ten thousand years of the island's habitation when compared to other countries. The genetic predominancy of the pre-'Celtic' population remained constant despite inward migration of later peoples (chiefly, later Celtic, Scandinavian and Anglo-Norman) at various points.

This has remained the situation until relatively recent times. The population until the mid-1990s was 3.5 million, and there were in 1995 circa 1 million domestic residences in the Republic. By 2007 this had become 1.9 million homes/residences, and today the official population figure is over 4.7 million. This is largely as a result of inward migration, there being no birth-rate surge amongst the native Irish to account for the increase. Indeed, there was a situation (due to the automatic awarding of citizenship to anybody born on the island irrespective of the nationality of their parents, the clause was later overturned by plebiscite in 2004) where for two years 80% of all births in the Irish Republic were to Nigerian mothers. There have been some anomalies in the official figures given by government of the size of the immigrant population, but a realistic estimate would place it at in excess of one million, perhaps substantially so (this can be deduced by the fact that there was no Irish birth-rate increase at the turn of the millenium to account for the circa 25% population increase. Other discrepancies leadig one to suspect the falsification of data by the Irish government include the latter's statement that UK citizens are Ireland's largest immigrant group [while encountering the different kinds of UK accents isn't quite a rarity in Ireland today, it is not exactly common as compared with the frequency of encountering accents, nationalities and ethnicities from other parts of the world], at over 300,000 which was not borne out by recent censuses which placed the figure at a fraction of that. However, we must also acknowldge that the censuses themselves are not reliable, as while officially obligatory participation is not always successful. There have also been substantial differences between the official figures given by the Irish government for the Polish-born population in Ireland, which was vastly different to the given by the Polish government themselves who placed the figure for the number of their citizens living in Ireland in the hundreds of thousands).

Today, in all of Ireland's urban centres, the proportion of schoolchildren with foreign-born as opposed to Irish parents ranges between 40-60% (prior to 1995 this was at about half a percent), which is by far the greater part of the population as rural areas are thinly populated (though even there, there are cases of small towns with extremely large immigrant populations, eg Gort, in Galway, where over 30% of the population are Brazilian). This can be accounted for by the fact that Ireland has received almost the entirety of its immigrant population over less than the last twenty-five years, and the corresponding age demographic of the immigrant population (mostly in their twenties and thirties, eg, typically that of those becoming parents).

So, it can be acknowledged the contributor who added the first part of this piece, above, is correct in saying that as the what constitutes the population present in the island and/or the Irish Republic at any point in time can, by some be read as equivalent to the 'Irish population', it fails to take note that what has been traditionally understood by 'Irish' is changed by this interpretation - from confined to a population defined by the complex of shared cultural and genetic heredity which was hitherto universally understood by the adjective 'Irish', to a definition meaning one living in the country (this remains the case whether or not one restricts the category to those holding legal citizenship of the State).

A lot of this depends on the subjective tendency that seems to hold sway bout how people and nations are defined at any point in time. Few europeans would, for instance, consider themselves, say, Japanese even they achieved Japanese citizenship through naturalisation. Sometimes words do indeed aquire meanings they did not originally have - eg, from denoting a celtic tribe 'Briton' has since become the typically chosen definition (ie, by themselves) of immigrants and their descendants in England, where 'English' has largely, though not exclusively been retained as the definition of those descended from the pre-existing population (perhaps also as with Welsh, Scottish ?).

So, taking into account the problem with definition, if one wishes to use the term 'Irish' as co-extent with the traditional cultural/genetic hereditary group who have for millennia lived on the Island, then to all appearances they will indeed become a minority both in the Republic and on the island as a whole, and it is highly likely that this will occur within just one successive generation (which is the largest single change to the demographic of any European Nation in modern history). If one wishes to take the view that the term changes with the demographic, the the earlier answer may prove adequate, but as the question 'will the irish ever become a minority in Ireland' then becomes an absurd/meaningless one , and I think we can take it that that is not what was being asked.

Answer 2

No they won't. New people come into countries all the time, but over that time they become part of the nation. The Irish people are made up of people that came to Ireland since people first inhabited it. They mainly came from other parts of Europe and down through history people have come from many places and they make what is now considered to be the Irish people. Genetically, they can be traced back to all the places that they came from. So in one sense you could say that there is no such thing as the "Irish people" as the people that live on the island of Ireland are all descended from people who came from other places and have been coming to Ireland over thousands of years.

That is the same for any country in the world. If you pick any country, in it you will find people who are descended from people from other places. There are people all around the world that are descended from Irish people, but they are now natives of their home countries. In the years, centuries and millennia to come, this process will continue all over the world. So the people that will be in Ireland in a thousand years from now, will still be considered to be Irish. It is the same that people that are today considered to be Irish have ancestors, maybe just a few generations back, that came from other countries, but those people are now Irish. Your question could have been asked at any time in the past, and since then new people have come to Ireland, to make up the current Irish people. The answer would still be the same. The Irish can never become a minority in their own country. As they have always done, since the moment the first settlers arrived thousands of years ago, the Irish will continue to change. What an Irish person is today is different than 100 years ago or 200 years ago or 500 years ago or 1000 years ago, but the people at any of those times, like the people in the future will be, are Irish. There is a common historical phrase in Ireland talking about people coming to Ireland as becoming "more Irish than the Irish themselves." That sums it up perfectly.