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Religious landscape

The main Christian groups

The population of Ireland is overwhelmingly Christian (93%) in terms of religious affiliation. The Roman Catholic Church is by far the largest religious body with the declared religious (...)

The population of Ireland is overwhelmingly Christian (93%) in terms of religious affiliation. The Roman Catholic Church is by far the largest religious body with the declared religious affiliation of 88.4% of the population as reported in the state census. The majority of Catholics are regular church attenders although attendance has fallen sharply in the past decade. The second largest Christian denomination is the Church of Ireland, which is part of the Anglican Communion. Although always a minority Church, the Church Of Ireland was the Established Church in Ireland until 1871. The Church of Ireland (like the Catholic Church) is organized on an all-Ireland basis with the larger part of its membership being in Northern Ireland. The other main Christian denominations are the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and the Methodists.

D 21 September 2012    ARichard O’Leary

Other Christian denominations

Other smaller Christian denominations include Orthodox, Pentecostalists, Quakers as well as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Mormons. With the strong immigration since the mid-1990s, notably from (...)

Other smaller Christian denominations include Orthodox, Pentecostalists, Quakers as well as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Mormons. With the strong immigration since the mid-1990s, notably from Nigeria and Romania, there has been an emergence of independent immigrant Christian churches.

D 21 September 2012    ARichard O’Leary

Non-Christian groups

Non-Christian religious believers have always been very few in the Republic of Ireland. Recent immigration has seen the declared Muslim population rise to 32,539, although this still represents (...)

Non-Christian religious believers have always been very few in the Republic of Ireland. Recent immigration has seen the declared Muslim population rise to 32,539, although this still represents less than one percent.

D 21 September 2012    ARichard O’Leary

The 2011 census

The most recent data on religious affiliation come from the 2011 census.
For more detail, see the table "Percentage and actual change population, sex, religion and statistic" of AIRO and the (...)

The most recent data on religious affiliation come from the 2011 census.

For more detail, see the table "Percentage and actual change population, sex, religion and statistic" of AIRO and the article "Ireland: recent religious trends and patterns" of Brian Conway on the ORELA website.

See also the ARDA (Association of Religion Data Archives) national profile for Ireland.

D 23 January 2015   

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