Ireland’s economic recovery is forecast to grow faster than any other European country.
If it does, 2016 will be the third consecutive year where the rate of growth has outstripped its partners.
The government is predicting an enviable increase of 3.4% in GDP.
Unemployment levels have shrunk to 8%, down from 15% in 2012.
One of the benefits of this acceleration is that fewer Irish nationals have been leaving their country. The number dropped sharply in the year to 2016.
The country has registered its first year of net immigration since the depths of the financial crash in 2009, according to official statistics. Net immigration takes into account both the number leaving and the number entering the country.
Net immigration to Ireland hit more than 100,000 during the housing boom years to 2008. After that, however, resident numbers spiralled down during the 2010-2013 bailout period when net figures reduced by some 30,000 people a year.
But in the year to April 2016, migration added about 3,000 people to the population. Pumping up the numbers were thousands of people with Irish nationality returning home – over 21,000 in the last year alone.
This was the first increase in seven years, according to the Irish statistics office.
The combined natural increase and positive net migration resulted in an overall increase in the population of 38,400 bringing the population estimate to 4.67 million in April 2016.
Since the time of the Great Famine years in the 1800s, a major export has been its children obliged to search elsewhere for work and sustenance, leading ultimately to millions of Irish-born living abroad, especially in the UK, the US, and Australia.
