PEOPLE FROM 188 different countries were living in the State at the time of the last census in 2006, new figures show.
Of the 420,000 non-Irish people residing in the State on census day in April 2006, the largest group were UK nationals, who numbered 112,000. Poles were the second-largest group, followed by Lithuanians, Nigerians and Latvians.
The top 10 countries accounted for 82 per cent of the total non-Irish population, and there were 44 countries - from Anguilla to Western Sahara - represented by fewer than 10 people.
The report of the non-Irish population, released yesterday by the Central Statistics Office, also shows that people from countries outside Europe had higher overall educational attainment than Irish people in the same age brackets.
In general foreign nationals were concentrated either in cities, particularly Dublin and Galway, or in the popular tourist destinations on the western and southern seaboards. Leitrim, Longford, Waterford city and county, Carlow and North Tipperary all had fewer than 5,000 foreign people, while Dublin City, Fingal, South Dublin and Cork county all had more than 20,000.
Non-Irish groups were dominated by people in their 20s and 30s, with significantly more men than women. There were few children and older people among them.
On areas of employment, the report finds wide variations according to nationality. While the services sector dominated for all groups, it was least important for those from the accession states, where industry and agriculture were more important.
Among nationals of the EU accession states, four industries employed three quarters of all workers: manufacturing, construction, wholesale/retail trade and hotels and restaurants. More than one fifth of those from other countries worked in health and social work, and these were mostly Asian.
The housing profile of the non-Irish was also very different to that of the Irish. While owner occupancy was most common among Irish and UK-headed households, almost 80 per cent of households headed by people from countries that joined the EU since 2004 were renting.
Given the overall impression of the non-Irish being generally young and single, the authors note that it is surprising to find that almost 42 per cent were married, compared with 46 per cent of the Irish population.
Nearly 4 per cent of the non-Irish were re-married, compared with just under 1 per cent of Irish people, reflecting the relatively recent introduction of divorce in Ireland.
Despite the high marriage rate among the foreign population, almost one in five married non-Irish nationals did not live with their spouse at the time of the census, and the data suggests that many more recent arrivals have left spouses behind in their home countries, as did many Irish in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s.
The report also sketches individual profiles of the 10 largest non-Irish groups. These show that two thirds of all Chinese were living in the greater Dublin area, compared with fewer than one in five Latvians, who favoured large and medium sized towns instead.
The Chinese and the French had the highest proportion of single people (69 per cent and 71 per cent respectively), while two thirds of Nigerians and Filipinos were married.
Polish men had the highest percentage at work (91 per cent) while over one in five Nigerian men were unemployed.
Lithuanian men had the highest percentage at work in the construction sector (37 per cent), while the US had the greatest proportions in the higher socio-economic groups of professionals and managers (19 per cent).
