Public Data Unpacked

Public Data Unpacked is an independent project that turns Irish public-sector datasets into clear, interactive dashboards. The data presented here is reproduced from public sources for analytical and informational purposes. No attempt is made to add to, alter, or enrich the underlying figures.

The site currently presents five datasets:

• IPAS Arrivals. Monthly arrivals to the International Protection Accommodation Service. Each month names the five nationalities with the most applications, alongside an aggregated "Other" total covering all remaining nationalities. Each row's value is the cumulative count year-to-date within that calendar year and resets to zero each January. A country's year-end value reflects all arrivals from January up to the latest month in which the country was in the published top-five. Sourced from the Department of Justice, Home Affairs and Migration's "International Protection in Numbers" collection, which publishes monthly International Protection Summary Report PDFs from which figures are aggregated. From May 2026 onwards, this collection replaces the previous source (ipo.gov.ie/en/ipo/pages/statistics) which is no longer active. Transition figures are consistent with the prior trajectory.
• IPAS Deportations. Monthly figures for deportation orders signed by the Minister, orders formally issued, and removals carried out. Sourced from the Department of Justice, Home Affairs and Migration's "International Protection in Numbers" collection, which publishes monthly International Protection Summary Report PDFs. Figures here are aggregated from those PDFs. The three metrics describe a process: an order is first signed, then formally issued to the recipient, and ultimately may result in a removal from the State. The gap between orders signed and removals carried out reflects appeals, voluntary departures, judicial reviews, and operational constraints — it does not represent a single "failure rate". Data published from April 2024 onwards.
• IPAS Payments. Quarterly payments to suppliers providing accommodation and related services to International Protection applicants and Ukrainian beneficiaries of temporary protection. Currently published by the Department of Justice, Home Affairs and Migration, which inherited responsibility for IPAS in 2025; payments through that period were originally published by the Department of Children, Disability and Equality (formerly the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth). Only payments of €20,000 or above are published by either department.
• Emergency Accommodation. Monthly counts of adults in emergency accommodation, broken down by nationality group (Irish / EEA / non-EEA). Sourced from the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage's homelessness data collection, which compiles monthly returns from local authorities' Pathway Accommodation and Support System (PASS).
• PPS Allocations. Monthly first-time Personal Public Service Number registrations, by nationality. Sourced from the Department of Social Protection. Each PPSN is unique and lifetime-issued, so the dataset captures only first-time registrations — not re-registrations or population estimates. Irish nationals are the largest single group (driven primarily by registrations at birth), followed by non-Irish first-time registrants. Covers 86 nationalities plus an aggregated "Other" bucket. Worth noting: this is a different population from IPAS Arrivals, which counts only people seeking international protection.
• Live Register by Nationality. Monthly counts of persons on the Irish Live Register, broken down by 5 nationality categories: Irish Nationals, United Kingdom, Other Nationals, EU14 excl Ireland, and EU15 to EU27. Sourced from the Central Statistics Office (CSO), table LRM19 — Persons on the Live Register classified by Nationality, covering January 2020 to May 2026. The Live Register counts persons receiving Jobseekers' Allowance, Jobseekers' Benefit, and certain related payments — it is a measure of claims, not a measure of unemployment. The official unemployment rate is published separately by the CSO's Labour Force Survey. The source data includes an aggregate "Non Irish Nationals" row that sums the four non-Irish categories; that row is excluded from this dataset so that summing across rows per month gives the actual total. From March 2020 through early 2022, the separate Pandemic Unemployment Payment (PUP) scheme operated alongside the Live Register, so figures from this period do not reflect total joblessness during the pandemic. The nationality breakdown should be read alongside Ireland's changing population composition over the period: growth in the non-Irish working-age population (work permits, EU free movement, international protection arrivals, Temporary Protection arrivals from Ukraine) means more people eligible to claim Jobseekers' payments, so percentage changes by nationality reflect changes in both the labour market and the population — not unemployment rates alone.
• Welfare Recipients. Quarterly counts of recipients per welfare scheme, broken down by programme group, basis (Social Assistance or Social Insurance), and nationality category. Sourced from the Department of Social Protection via data.gov.ie (CC-BY 4.0), covering 2014 to 2024 across 22 schemes and 5 nationality categories. The headline figures on the dashboard show end-of-year (Q4) snapshots to give a stable year-on-year comparison; the time-series chart shows all four quarters for finer detail. A person who receives multiple schemes simultaneously (e.g. State Pension and Household Benefits) appears in multiple rows in the same quarter, so totals reflect recipient-instances rather than unique people. The dataset does not include population denominators, so comparisons between nationality categories are presented as raw counts and shares only — not as rates of welfare receipt across population groups.
• IPAS Appeals. Annual statistics from the International Protection Appeals Tribunal (IPAT), the body that hears appeals against International Protection Office (IPO) refusals. Sourced from IPAT, covering 2019 to 2025. Data spans appeals on hand (backlog) at the start and end of each year, appeals received by type and country of origin, monthly decisions issued, decision outcomes, and appeals withdrawn. The dataset counts appeals processed, not unique applicants — one person can lodge multiple appeals of different types (e.g. Dublin III, Inadmissible, Subsequent), and the relationship between appeal counts and unique applicants is not specified by the source. Outcome labels use the source's terminology: "Granted: Asylum" and "Granted: Subsidiary Protection" indicate the tribunal overturned the IPO's original refusal, while "Refused" indicates the original refusal was upheld (the next step for the applicant is judicial review, which falls outside this dataset). Note also a small discrepancy in the source's 2024 figures: the published Grand Total for decisions is 2,877 but the monthly figures only sum to 2,827. This dashboard uses the monthly sums.

The four datasets are not directly comparable because they describe different kinds of measurement:

• Cumulative year-to-date (Arrivals). Each monthly figure represents the total arrivals recorded so far in that calendar year. Values reset at the start of each year. Summing twelve monthly rows would double-count; the December row alone gives the year's total.
• Transactional (Payments). Each row is an individual payment. Totals can be summed freely across any combination of quarter, supplier, or category.
• Point-in-time snapshot (Emergency Accommodation). Each row is a count of people in accommodation as of that month. The figures cannot be summed across months — a person counted in February is also (likely) counted in March.
• Per-month counts (PPS Allocations, IPAS Deportations). Each row is the count of events that occurred within a single month. Unlike Arrivals, values do not accumulate; summing across months gives the period total.
• Quarterly per-category snapshots (Welfare Recipients). Each row is a count of recipients for a specific scheme, basis, and nationality as of that quarter. Values cannot be summed naively across rows — a person on two schemes appears twice in the same quarter, and a long-term recipient appears in every quarter they receive support. To compare welfare receipt over time, the dashboard uses end-of-year (Q4) snapshots and compares Q4 to Q4 across years; summing all rows in a year would multiply each recipient by the number of schemes and quarters they appear in.

The arrivals dashboard handles cumulative data correctly by using year-end values when computing totals across multiple years.

• "Other" countries excluded. The arrivals dashboard excludes the catch-all "Other" category from all rankings, totals, and stats. Including it would distort country comparisons.
• Payment publication threshold. The published payments source data appears to include only payments of approximately €20,000 and above; smaller payments are not disclosed in the source. Total spend figures on the Payments dashboard reflect only those disclosed amounts and will understate true total expenditure.

• On the Arrivals dashboard, country-level totals are accurate as of the latest month each country appeared in the published top-five. For persistent top-five countries this typically represents the full calendar year. For countries that only appear occasionally, the year-end value reflects their cumulative count up to the most recent month they were published; arrivals in subsequent months of the same year are absorbed into "Other".
• This site is not affiliated with any government department or agency. All data sources are credited above.
• For authoritative figures, refer directly to the publishing department's most recent release.

The site also includes views that join two or more source datasets to surface comparisons that aren't visible in either dataset alone. These pages do not introduce new data — they reuse the source datasets above, with additional transformations applied server-side.

A note on inherited limitations. Cross-dataset views inherit every caveat of the source datasets they combine. If a source dataset is partial, lagged, or excludes certain categories, those characteristics carry through. Joined views are therefore subject to all the caveats listed in the Data sources section above.

• IPAS Arrivals & Removals. Compares per-month IPAS arrivals against monthly removals carried out, for the period both datasets cover (April 2024 onwards). Arrivals are stored in source form as cumulative year-to-date totals; this view converts them to per-month figures by subtracting the prior month's cumulative within the same calendar year, with the value resetting each January. Two important caveats apply: the period is constrained by when Deportations data began being published systematically (April 2024), and the two flows should be read as concurrent activity rather than cause and effect — a person arriving in a given month is rarely the same person removed that month, because the international protection process typically takes months to years to resolve.
• IPAS Arrivals & PPS Allocations. For each nationality, total IPAS arrivals as a share of total first-time PPS registrations. The PPS Allocations dataset captures all first-time PPSN registrations regardless of route — work visas, study permits, family reunification, EU free movement, asylum/IP arrivals, and registrations at birth for Irish nationals. The "IPAS share of PPS" metric contextualises the size of the international protection flow against this broader inflow. Three important methodology notes apply: (a) the view is limited to the 12 nationalities that appear in IPAS Arrivals from 2023 onwards (these are the countries the IP route applies to in this dataset; EU/EEA countries and other nationalities for whom the IP route is not relevant are not shown); (b) Vietnam appears as "Vietnam" in IPAS but as "Viet Nam" in PPS — this view treats them as the same country; (c) Palestine appears in IPAS Arrivals but is not separately reported in PPS Allocations source data, so its PPS figure and share are shown as "n/a" rather than zero (the IPAS arrivals figure for Palestine is still shown in selected country totals, but excluded from the overall IPAS-share-of-PPS calculation, which is computed only across countries with PPS data).
• IPAS Arrivals & Appeals. Annual IPAS arrivals alongside appeals received by the International Protection Appeals Tribunal (IPAT), covering 2019 to 2025. Both trajectories are shown on the same chart to illustrate parallel growth, but the relationship between them is mediated by IPO processing time — appeals received in year N are largely from people who arrived in earlier years, not the same year. This means year-on-year ratios between arrivals and appeals are not meaningful. The view is presented to show scale: arrivals grew by roughly 175% from 2019 to 2025, while appeals received grew by roughly 643% over the same period. In 2025, appeals received (15,334) actually exceeded arrivals (13,162) for the first time, reflecting both the accumulated backlog of cases from earlier years and the fact that one person can lodge multiple appeals (Dublin III, Inadmissible, Subsequent, Reception Conditions, plus the main IP appeal).