What caused the large increase in international protection applications in Ireland in 2022?

In 2022, after Ireland emerged from COVID-related restrictions, 13,651 international protection applications(also known as asylum applications) were lodged, representing a 186% increase from 2019 (the last comparable year before Covid-19). No single nationality dominated the increase, making it unclear why such an increase had occurred. The trend was unusual because, while applications also increased in the EU as a whole, the relative increase in Ireland was much larger, which is historically uncommon, with Ireland largely insulated from increases in Europe over the last decade (see figure 1). Applications remained close to this historically high rate in 2023, with a total of 13,277 applications. While Ireland has seen many arrivals from Ukraine following the Russian invasion, most of these people reside under the Temporary Protection Directive and are not counted in asylum statistics and are not included in the ESRI Report summarised in this Memo.