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 four datasets:

• IPAS Arrivals. Monthly arrivals to the International Protection Accommodation Service, sourced from the International Protection Office statistics page. 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.
• 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.

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). Each row is the count of registrations that occurred within a single month. Unlike Arrivals, values do not accumulate; summing across months gives the period total.

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.