He received the information in a written response.
Noel Grealish made headlines on Tuesday when he raised questions about the amount of money sent out of Ireland to other countries.
The Galway West TD quoted figures from the World Bank when he said: “Over the past eight years alone, over €10 billion has left this country by way of personal transfers. This is a staggering amount of money.”
Grealish was accused of “disgraceful racism” by Socialist TD Ruth Coppinger when he singled out the sum paid to Nigeria, which he said was €3.4 billion over eight years.
“Taoiseach, transfers to other EU countries I can understand, for example money being transferred to the United Kingdom, our nearest neighbour, with over 100,000 British people living in Ireland and over 10,000 Irish students in the United Kingdom.”
“But Taoiseach, €3.4 billion transferred to one non-EU country [Nigeria] is astronomical,” he said in the Dáil, before asking if the money sent out of Ireland was monitored by the Department of Finance and if some of it was the proceeds of crime.
The Central Statistics Office (CSO) said on Wednesday that their figures show remittances being sent from Ireland to Nigeria of around €17 million each year for the period 2010-2017.
Records show that Noel Grealish was given these figures from the CSO on the 22 October this year in response to a written question.
Grealish’s question at the time was: “To ask the Taoiseach the amount sent out of Ireland in personal remittances in each of the past 10 years; and the countries to which they were sent each year.”
He received the response from Galway West TD Sean Kyne, who responded with a breakdown of figures of remittances from the CSO, including an estimate that €17 million in remittances was paid from Ireland to Nigeria from 2010-2017.
The CSO said remittance figures are difficult to compile and said figures are usually “based on administrative sources and modelling rather than direct collection”.
It said the current CSO data is estimated with Revenue figures, with pay of non-national workers used to estimate disposable income and to derive a remittance amount.
So where did Grealish get his €3.4 billion figure from?
It’s also important to note where exactly the World Bank figures for remittance come from and why it’s important to take them with a pinch of salt.
These figures are published by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and are estimated using two inputs.
- The number of migrants in a particular country.
- The GDP per capita of that country, in this instance, Ireland.
Nigeria had a total remittance inflow of $24.31 billion in 2018. This figure is then divided into an individual figure from each country, based on their migrant population and the country’s GDP.
So, using population data from the UN and Ireland’s GDP per capita of $78,750 in 2018, they calculated that Ireland paid a remittance of $539 million to Nigeria last year.
However, the GDP per capita in Ireland is not a good indicator of actual wealth due to the fact figures are skewed due to multinational companies moving their intellectual property to Ireland, resulting in a spike in Irish earnings.
The CSO revealed that during the 2016 census in Ireland, 13,079 Nigerian and Irish-Nigerian people living in Ireland.
To reach the $539 million figure quoted by Grealish from the World Bank, each one of these 13,079 people would have to send $41,211 to Nigeria in 2018.
LISTEN: You Must Be Jokin’ with Conor Sketches | Tiger Woods loves Ger Loughnane and cosplaying as Charles LeClerc
