St. Patrick's Day

There are 34.7 million U.S. residents with Irish ancestry. This number is more than seven times the population of Ireland itself.

Irish is the nation’s second most frequently reported ancestry, ranking behind German.

Across the country, 11 percent of residents lay claim to Irish ancestry. That number more than doubles to 23 percent in the state of Massachusetts.

Irish is the most common ancestry in 54 U.S. counties, of which 44 are in the Northeast. Middlesex County in Massachusetts tops the list with 348,978 Irish Americans, followed by Norfolk County, MA, which has 203,285.

Irish ranks among the top five ancestries in every state except Hawaii and New Mexico. It is the leading ancestry group in Delaware, Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

There are approximately 144,588 current U.S. residents who were born in Ireland.

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Damien's note: The famous Irish Need Not Apply signs may or may not have been common in the States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most historians seem to believe anti-Irish [immigrant] feeling was wide-spread, but there are those who claim such prejudices were restricted mostly to recent English immigrants who brought their bias with them. Whatever the case, anti-immigrant feeling is obviously as American as the flag, mom and apple pie, even to this day. Today, of course, many of those anti-immigrant Americans are descended, like me, from the Irish.