FAKE STATISTICS AND false claims about Ireland’s demographics are being shared online in an effort to strike panic and convince readers that the country is being transformed by uncontrolled ethnic change.

A recent map that, at a glance, appears to show few “ethnic Irish” people living in parts of the country is just the latest in a wider trend that misrepresents data.

The pattern is largely driven by adherents of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, though the claims and graphics themselves can be shared in turn by people who simply believe they convey true but surprising information. 

Sometimes rebranded as the Great Plantation to evoke a painful chapter in Ireland’s colonial past, the Great Replacement theory posits that the native people of Europe are being replaced by non-white immigrants, often Arab or Muslim people, and that this is orchestrated by a group of clandestine, powerful elites.

Many social media posts have sought to introduce the idea with fake or misleading claims.

Often, this is part of an effort to induce a sense that immigration levels are far higher than they are, or to imply that the media or the government are refusing to talk about immigration – a common claim in far-right circles, despite the huge coverage that migration topics receive in both the media and in the Oireachtas.

However, readers convinced of enough fake stats can be induced into a parallel belief structure. This often involves delegitimising sources of real information and prevents different groups from engaging with each other in productive debate, as they can no longer agree on the base facts. 

The total number of International Protection applicants, or asylum seekers, is falling. It reached 17,323 a year in 2023, but dropped to 11,195 in 2025.

However, there remain 32,800 applicants in International Protection accommodation, including 9,844 children. 

As of the end of May, 5,137 International Protection applications had been made this year. However, there has been a significant drop in applicants since the implementation of the EU migration pact in June, with arrivals dropping to about half what they were.

Bad stats

Social media posts using fake stats include viral maps claiming that Irish was the second-most spoken language in every county in 2022, but had been displaced by 2025 by a mix of Polish, Romanian and Lithuanian.

However, the data represented on the map appears to have been a pure invention. It directly contradicts the actual data on languages spoken as collected by the Central Statistics Office.

Due to the way this information is counted, Irish and other languages can’t be compared.

But rather than Romanian being the most common foreign language in Cork, as the map said, it is actually ninth on the list, behind (among other languages) Polish, French, Spanish, German and Portuguese.

Similarly, in Dublin City, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, and French all appear to be more widely spoken than Polish, contradicting the map.

In some other cases, the claims were loosely based on real events, such as the dramatic influx of Ukrainians in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

For example, a false claim said Ukrainians made up more than 10% of the population of County Kerry. This is nowhere near true.

Ukrainians have never made up more than 10% of the population of any Irish county, though they do make up 10% of the smaller local electoral area of Kenmare, Kerry.

Ukrainians are not the only minority group targeted in these misleading claims. Muslims also bear much of the brunt of this type of misinformation, both in Ireland and across the English-speaking world.

These claims often take the form of exaggerated figures for the number of Muslims living in the United States or Europe.

A commonly repeated claim – often shared as a titbit, but also an old favourite of far-right figures – is that the most popular name for boys in Galway is Muhammad.

It’s not. Jack is.

Muhammad was the most popular baby name for Galway City alone, once, in 2022. 

Given the modest size of Galway City (it has less than one third the population as Galway county) about eight babies called Muhammad would have topped the list of boys’ names there that year. 

Nevertheless, the fairly trivial choices of a small sample size had been weaponised to indicate it illustrated dramatic cultural changes in Ireland.  

In another case, a claim leaning into the Great Replacement conspiracy theory stated that there were more Muslims in Ireland than people living in Gaeltacht areas – again, by using inflated figures for Muslims.

The map claimed there were 112,000 Muslims living in Ireland. The actual figure was 81,930, significantly less than the 106,220 people living in Gaeltacht areas.  

These claims are likely intended to signify that (for Christian, ethnic Irish people at least) the country is changing and will soon become alien and unrecognisable. This is similar to Conor McGregor’s baseless claim from a White House podium in 2025 that many Irish people are now a minority.

These claims and tactics are common across white supremacist groups internationally. 

’90% ethnic Irish’

One recent claim that was shared on social media bears all the hallmarks of the above examples.

It misuses facts and statistics, makes arbitrary claims that have no clear significance on their own, and gives a vague sense that people should be worried about changing ethnic demographics in Ireland.

“Ireland Census 2022 – Showing only County Council/LEAs with 90% or higher Ethnic Irish” reads a 15 July post on X, showing a map with six local electoral areas (LEAs) in Ireland highlighted.

The map was shared by a user called “Irish Statistics”, an account that regularly claims Irish people are being “replaced” and reposts from accounts promoting the Great Replacement conspiracy theory.

The account does not make any claims about whether a LEA having an ethnically Irish population below 90% is significant; it simply implies this is a bad thing to happen.

The map has a precedent in the form of a similar map of the United States.

“The largest, fastest demographic decimation in world history,” reads a post on X with a map supposedly showing “90% White Counties” in 1920 America, compared with 2020.

“If it were done to anyone else, it would be called genocide. But when it’s done to White people, it’s called ‘diversity’.”

The post was published on 14 July, a day before the Irish map. 

The framing is bizarre: there is no genocide against white people in the United States, and again, having a white population below 90% in an arbitrary administrative district does not have any inherent significance.

This is a claim commonly made in conspiracy theorist groups, and has taken root politically. An unsupported claim that there was a genocide against white South African farmers was pushed by Elon Musk and ultimately embraced by Donald Trump.

Despite the framing, the X post featuring the US map successfully riled up commenters, as did the Irish post made the next day.

“Ireland is disappearing before our eyes,” one reply to the post featuring the map of Ireland reads.

“This is the real Irish genocide,” reads another. “Brought to you by SF/FF/FG and paid for by the Irish taxpayer.”

Other responses describe the map as “horrifying” or “heartbreaking”. But there is another way to describe the Irish map: inaccurate.

Unlike the previous claims we’ve looked at, this one is based on real statistics – it just misreads them.

According to the map shared on social media, there are just six LEAs with a 90% ethnic Irish population or higher.

The map is based on real CSO figures but misuses them.

In particular, it appears to be using the dataset called ‘Usually Resident Population by Ethnic or Cultural Background’.

That dataset looks at responses to the 2022 census, which asked: “what is your ethnic group / background?”

The 12 possible answers included four options for “white”: Irish, Irish Traveller, Roma, and any other white background, as well as options for Black, Asian, or other groups, including “mixed”.

The statistics in the map appear to be derived by adding the responses for Irish and Irish Traveller together to give a figure for the “ethnic Irish” in an LEA. This figure was then divided by the total number of people mentioned in the census responses to give a result.

Unlike the similar American map, the Irish one does not include other white backgrounds. If it had, 137 LEAs would have been highlighted as being at least 90% white – most of the entire map.

It focuses on the two groups it identifies as “ethnic Irish” – but it makes a mistake in calculating the percentage.

The actual results of the census on the CSO website did not present the data using the same 12 categories as the census forms asked. Instead, all “Black” people were grouped under one heading, as were all respondents to “Asian” categories.

And while the categories “White Irish” and “White Irish Traveller” featured in the results, so too did an entirely new category: “not stated” – people who simply did not fill in this section of the census form.

As such, we have no statistics on the ethnicity of people who did not provide an answer.

The map suggested that only six Local Electoral Areas had a “90% or higher Ethnic Irish” population.

But the figures on the map weren’t derived by comparing the number of people who responded “White Irish” and “White Irish Traveller” to other answers.

Instead, the map compared the “ethnic Irish” group to all census respondents, including the small but substantial number of people who didn’t give any answer at all. In other words, it assumes non-answers are the same as someone saying that they were not ethnically Irish.

If we only count census forms that actually responded to the question, how does that change the map of electoral areas?

Instead of six areas, more than 33 local electoral areas cross the 90% threshold.

We can also use this adjustment to give an overview of the ethnic mix of Ireland. 

The 2022 census gives us a snapshot, which includes non-residents like tourists. The snapshot says we are 81.5% White Irish, 0.7% Irish Traveller, and 10.5% other white backgrounds.

Another 1.5% of people are Black, 3.5% are Asian, and 0.4% are Arab. 1.4% said they were “other” or mixed. 

The 90% threshold was an arbitrary limit that misleads. And it still is even when the figures are counted correctly. At an equally arbitrary 80% threshold, most of the map would be highlighted.

The question could be asked: what difference would it make to be at one side of this figure rather than the other?

These misleading maps manufacture a crisis. They are intended to scare people into feeling that Ireland is changing so fast that they can’t keep up. They twist evidence to jolt Irish people into believing they are being “replaced” – even though the facts say something different.

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