This is a lot of people…
2016 has been a crazy year. Maybe the craziest ever. Leicester won the Premier League, Donald Trump was elected as President of the United States and Britain voted to leave the European Union.
Luckily, Ireland have had a relatively quiet year, in comparison to the aforementioned events anyway. This has led to a record number of Irish passports being issued in 2016 – over 700,000.
All of the most recent figures are available here.
Perhaps the chaos of Brexit was just too much for some Brits, with statistics showing a 42% increase from 2015.
The Irish passport service tweeted on Monday announcing that the record had been broken.
Wow, we have just broken a new record, over 700,000 Passports have been issued so far this year! #RecordBreaker pic.twitter.com/Vg3rvJOutm
— Irish Passport Service (@PassportIRL) November 28, 2016
The increase from last year was just under 5%, but the number of people applying from Britain greatly increased.
The number of applications from Northern Ireland also increased, up 27% from 2015.
As a result of Brexit, an Irish passport could be extremely beneficial to a British person, as they would regain their ability to work freely throughout the EU.
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