More than 17m fewer travellers to and from Ireland in 2020 than previous year

Just over four million overseas passengers have travelled to and from Ireland so far in 2020, down from 17.4 million by the same point last year.

Central Statistics Office (CSO) travel data released on Monday shows 4.19 million people travelled into Ireland and 4.17 million travelled out of the country between January and October 2020, a drop of around 76 per cent on the same time last year.

By October 2019, 17.42 million passengers had travelled into the country and 17.49 million had travelled out of Ireland.

The latest CSO data also shows the number of people arriving into Ireland and departing the country dropped by around a third between September and October of this year.

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In October 2020, 160,900 passengers arrived into the country and 163,300 departed the country, down from 254,400 arrivals and 236,700 departures in September, indicating that many people were adhering to the Level 5 restrictions which came into effect on October 21st.

Of the 160,900 people who arrived into Ireland in October, 88.5 per cent came by air and 11.5 per cent arrived by sea with similar figures for those departing the country.

Some 56,400 of these came from Britain with 13,700 coming from Spain and 13,500 coming from Poland. Some 8,900 people arrived from the Netherlands, 7,700 from France, 7,000 from Germany and 6,600 from both Portugal and Italy in October. Another 22,500 were classified by the CSO as coming from "other EU27" countries with a total of 91,000 people arriving into Ireland on continental routes in October.

Around 3.5 per cent (5,600) arrived in October by transatlantic routes and 4.9 per cent (7,900) from other overseas routes.

The number of passengers arriving from the United States into Ireland dropped from 92,500 in January 2020 to about 1,000 in April. Numbers from the US increased again through the summer, peaking at 10,000 in August. Some 8,600 travellers arrived from the US in September and 5,100 came in October.

Numbers of arrivals from Britain dropped from 498,700 in January of this year to a low of 9,300 in April. Some 112,600 people arrived from Britain in August and 77,000 arrived in September.