30,000 migrants a year forecast

Immigration: In drawing up its population projections, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) has forecast that there will be continuing significant immigration into Ireland annually until 2021.

The CSO made two assumptions on the level of internal migration - one of these was that immigration would continue into Ireland at a high level of up to 30,000 people per annum. Under the second scenario there would be more moderate levels of inward movements of people.

In its first migration assumption, the CSO estimated that immigration would run at a level of around 30,000 per anum up to 2016.

Migration from abroad would then fall back to around 20,000 for each of the next five years until 2021.

In its second scenario, the CSO projected there would be more moderate immigration of around 20,000 per year until 2011. The rate of migration from abroad would then reduce to 10,000 per annum from 2011 to 2016. At that point immigration levels would fall further to around 5,000 each year.

All the immigration forecasts are based on net figures.

In both of its scenarios the CSO has estimated that there would be emigration levels of around 20,000 or 21,000 each year from Ireland in the period up to 2021.