A FALSE CLAIM that one in every ten people in Co Kerry is now Ukrainian has spread online since being posted by an anti-immigration activist.

“Ten percent of the Kerry population is now Ukrainian,” Niall McConnell says to camera, in a clip that has been viewed more than 16,000 times since being posted to Facebook on 23 November.

The video ends with an appeal to sign up for a “gold membership” to Siol na hÉireann, an anti-immigrant group led by McConnell. According to the group’s website, membership costs €119 a year.

The Journal has previously debunked posts by both McConnell and Síol na hÉireann that have spread false claims which target immigrants.

Earlier this month, The Journal debunked a post by McConnell that overestimated the number of Ukrainians in Ireland by tens of thousands.

McConnell’s latest video makes other questionable claims, including that Ukrainians receive “free cars” in Ireland (they don’t).

However, the claim that ten percent of the Kerry population is now Ukrainian is the most striking.

Ireland’s Central Statistics Office (CSO) publishes regular updates both on Ireland’s population as a whole, as well as the Ukrainian population within Ireland.

On 19 November, just days before McConnell released his video, the CSO published their 17th update on arrivals to Ireland from Ukraine.

This included a relevant section entitled: “Beneficiaries of Temporary Protection from Ukraine with recent activity in administrative data (based on PPSN allocations) as a percentage of the Census 2022 de facto population, as of 3 November 2025.”

This looks at how many people currently in each part of the country fled from Ukraine.

Census 2022 was carried out less than two weeks into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and according to CSO figures, that was a time when less than 500 people had fled from Ukraine to Ireland.

 The Kenmare Local Electoral Area (LEA) in Co Kerry had the highest proportion of Ukrainians in the country. However, it did not amount to 10 percent as McConnell has claimed.

Instead, the amount of Ukrainians in the area it stood at 6.9 percent of its 2022 population.

Other areas in Kerry had far lower proportions of Ukrainians, such as Castleisland LEA, where they made up less than one percent of people living there.

These varying numbers reflect the small population sizes of these areas. As of the last census, Kenmare LEA had a population of 27,161, so 6.9 percent of the area’s 2022 population amounts to only 1,873 Ukrainians.

It should also be noted that these percentages would be an overestimate for the proportion of Ukrainians in Kenmare LEA now; an influx of new people raises the total population.

1,873 is 6.9% of the 27,161 residents that were in Kenmare LEA in 2022. But adding the 1,873 Ukrainians increased the population to 29,034, so a more accurate estimate is that Ukrainians make up about 6.4% of the current Kenmare LEA population.

In total, the CSO records that there are 6,642 Ukrainians in all of Co Kerry. CSO estimates also put the population of Kerry at 156,458 in 2022.

So what proportion of the sum of these figures do Ukrainians in Kerry represent? About 4 percent — less than half of what McConnell had claimed.

There is another figure regularly cited, which is for arrivals only. However, this is an inaccurate measure of how many Ukrainians are still in the state; tens of thousands of people who fled Ukraine to Ireland have since left. 

Instead, administrative data activity in recent months — such as active employment, picking up a social welfare payment, or having a child enrolled in a childcare or education scheme — is used to estimate the number of Ukrainians who were still in the country. 

The claim that one in ten people living in Kerry were Ukrainian was also published by the Irish Independent on 4 November. It is unclear where these figures are from, and they contradict the numbers given in the CSO dataset UA05. 

The Journal’s FactCheck is a signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network’s Code of Principles. You can read it here. For information on how FactCheck works, what the verdicts mean, and how you can take part, check out our Reader’s Guide here. You can read about the team of editors and reporters who work on the factchecks here.