Brazilians form the largest Latin American diaspora group in Ireland by a wide margin. Historically, Irish people tended to emigrate to Brazil rather than the other way around, but this trend has reversed since the late 20th century. The 2022 census recorded 27,338 Brazilian nationals living in the state, almost double the figure recorded in 2016 and more than six times the number counted in 2006. Research commissioned by the Brazilian embassy in Dublin suggests the true figure is considerably higher than the census total, since many Brazilians hold Italian, Portuguese or other European passports, and an unknown further number are undocumented; embassy estimates of the community's size have ranged from roughly 58,500 in 2024 to about 70,000 in 2023. By these estimates, Brazilians make up somewhere between one and 1.5% of the population of Ireland.
History
Early waves (1990s to 2000s) In 1992, Brazil opened an embassy in Dublin.
According to Paulo Azevedo of the Brazilian embassy, there have been three broad waves of Brazilians moving to Ireland: factory workers during the Celtic Tiger years (late 1990s into the 2000s), students from the 2000s to the present, and, from the 2010s onwards, engineers and IT specialists.
Jerry O'Callaghan, an Irish export manager, was working in the meat industry in Goiás, Brazil when the company he was working for shut down. He organised for the Brazilians who had lost their jobs to move to Ireland in 1999, where they found work at the Duffy Meat Plant in Gort, County Galway. Many of Gort's Brazilians originated from Anápolis, a city of around 334,000 people in Goiás state, following the closure there of a large meat-processing plant. O'Callaghan, who had worked in Brazil's meat industry since the 1970s, had already helped send an earlier group of Anápolis workers to the Kepak plant in Clonee, County Meath, before the larger movement to Gort began in 1999. By 2006, Brazilians made up around 40% of the town's population, and the town was dubbed "Little Brazil". At the community's peak in 2007, an estimated 1,600 people, again around 40% of the town's population, were Brazilian, and the community held its own annual Quadrilha festival, a traditional dance event associated with the Festa Junina season. However, the closure of Duffy in 2007 and the Great Recession jeopardised their employment and thus their residence permits, causing many to leave.
Many who left Gort during the recession returned to Anápolis, where the meat factory that had originally driven emigration to Ireland later reopened under new ownership. Return migrants described mixed experiences of readjusting to life in Brazil, with some noting that children who had grown up in Ireland identified as Irish and struggled to settle back into Brazilian schools. Chain migration was a defining feature of the community's growth in the town, with most arrivals having been brought over by a family member or friend who had emigrated before them.
A local football club, Coole FC, was founded in Gort in 2009 partly to draw the town's Brazilian population into the local sporting scene, and adopted a crest featuring the Brazilian flag alongside the Irish tricolour. A squad containing 17 or 18 Brazilian players out of a panel of 30 won the club's first piece of silverware, the Clare League Division Three title, in 2011, following a 12-game unbeaten run. By 2014, following the closure of the meat plant and the recession that followed, Gort's Brazilian population had fallen from a Celtic Tiger-era peak of up to 1,600 to around 300 to 400, out of a town of just over 2,500 people.
Other towns with meat-processing industries also recruited Brazilian workers during this period, including Roscommon and a plant in County Cavan. By 2003, around 500 Brazilians made up more than 10% of Roscommon town's population, the largest single group within a wider foreign-national community that also included Poles, Lithuanians, Estonians, Russians and Filipinos. Many worked at the Kepak meat factory in Athleague, which employed around 60 Brazilians and 15 Polish workers among a staff of 170 after the company began recruiting abroad in the late 1990s in response to a shortage of Irish labour willing to take on the physically demanding work. Kepak said Brazilian employees were paid the same basic rates as Irish colleagues, and the company employed full-time Brazilian interpreters to help bridge the language barrier faced by many workers. Some of these workers were married men who had come alone, intending to send money home and eventually return to Brazil, while others settled more permanently and brought their families over for security. Local bodies, including a working committee established by the Mid-South Roscommon Rural Development Company, sought to promote cross-cultural integration, while the Brazilian community itself organised social events such as regular "Brazil nights" of samba music at a Roscommon nightclub. Catia da Nova, an outreach worker with the South Roscommon Resource Family Centre, has described a long-standing divide between the largely middle-class Brazilian population of Dublin and Brazilians in towns such as Roscommon, many of whom had come from small towns in Brazil with little local work and took up jobs in meat factories after arriving in Ireland.
Student migration and the "fourth wave" (2000s and 2010s) In the 2000s, more Brazilians began coming to Ireland for study. Ed Giansante of eDublin, an organisation for Brazilians interested in moving to Ireland, believes the second wave began around 2007. The reason many Brazilians seeking to study in an English-speaking country choose Ireland is that Ireland is especially accessible to them: Brazilians are non-visa-required nationals who can travel to Ireland and apply for permission to enter the state at the point of arrival, without the lengthy advance visa process required by countries such as the United States. Once here, English-language students can upgrade to a residence permit for a fee, entitling them to work up to 20 hours a week during term time and up to 40 hours a week during holidays, a considerably more permissive arrangement than the short-term study visa offered in the United Kingdom, which does not allow work at all. Many Brazilian students work in retail and food service alongside their studies.
Annie Rozario of the Gort Resource Centre suggested there had been "an unacknowledged fourth wave" in the late 2010s due to economic and political conditions back home, particularly among young people disillusioned with the Bolsonaro government. In 2021, the Brazilian Left Front (a left-wing Brazilian political organisation in Ireland) organised protests in Dublin, Galway, and Cork alongside cities in other countries in solidarity with the anti-Bolsonaro protests back home.
A parallel wave of Brazilian postgraduate and undergraduate students arrived in Ireland from 2013 as part of "Science Without Borders (Ciência sem Fronteiras)", a Brazilian government scholarship programme launched in 2011 to fund study abroad for around 101,000 students, mainly in science, engineering, technology and mathematics. Ireland's Higher Education Authority co-ordinated the country's participation through a consortium called Research Brazil Ireland; 26 Irish third-level institutions took part, with the University of Limerick, Waterford Institute of Technology and NUI Galway the most popular destinations. Some 537 Brazilians applied to study in Irish institutions in the programme's first year, rising to 973 in 2014 and 1,084 in 2015, and by 2015 the Higher Education Authority estimated that Brazil had transferred over €50 million to Irish institutions to cover tuition, accommodation and English-language courses, with participating students spending a further estimated €20 million from other funds while in the country. The programme was extended by Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff through to 2018.
2020s
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the community significantly in its early stages. In February 2021, Gort was home to an estimated 2,500 Brazilians, many working in construction, care work, cleaning, retail and hairdressing following the earlier closure of the town's meat plant, and community members estimated that Covid-19 infection rates among Brazilians in the area had reached as high as 30%, with several people requiring intensive care in Galway. Undocumented migrants were particularly badly affected: without a PPS number they could not claim the Pandemic Unemployment Payment when work dried up during successive lockdowns, and some returned to Brazil as a result, while the wider community organised fundraising for food hampers and medicine to support those in hardship. New travel restrictions introduced in early 2021, including mandatory hotel quarantine for arrivals from Brazil, were broadly accepted within the community despite the additional cost and inconvenience involved.
The community continued to expand through the 2020s, although estimates of its total size have varied considerably depending on the methodology used. The 2022 census recorded 27,338 Brazilian nationals in the state, but the Brazilian embassy has argued this significantly understates the true population. An embassy-commissioned survey of almost 4,000 Brazilian nationals, carried out by consultants Unleashe and published in April 2024, estimated the community at approximately 58,500 people, of whom 78.5% had arrived since 2016. Estimates issued by the embassy in other years have differed: in January 2023 it suggested a figure of around 70,000, while by 2025 and 2026 its working estimate stood at approximately 60,000.
In February 2025, members of the Brazilian community, led by Fernanda Otero of the group Casa Brazil, submitted a petition with around 30,000 signatures calling for a direct flight route between Ireland and Brazil, citing the difficulty and expense of connecting flights for family visits, particularly for elderly relatives unfamiliar with navigating foreign airports. Dublin Airport reported that 140,000 passengers departing from there in the previous year had cited Brazil as their final destination, up 20% on 2019 figures, while both the airport authority and Brazil's ambassador to Ireland, Flávio Helmond Macieira, said a bilateral air service agreement between the two governments would be needed before a direct route could be established.
Demographics The 2016 census recorded around 13,640 non-Irish national residents of Brazilian origin, a figure more than tripled from a decade earlier. A contemporary report in The Irish Times cited a slightly higher total for the same census, 15,796, describing Brazilians as the second-fastest-growing nationality in Ireland in absolute terms since 2011. Eurostat reported that 27,192 Brazilians were holding Irish residence permits in 2019, having consistently increased since 2016. This number fell to 22,481 in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. By 2021, more than 5,800 PPS numbers had been issued to Brazilian nationals in a single year, around one in every twelve issued to a foreign national, rising to roughly one in five once nationals of the European Economic Area, Switzerland and the United Kingdom were excluded from the comparison.
The 2022 census recorded 27,338 Brazilian nationals, almost double the 2016 total and more than six times the 2006 figure of 4,388. As discussed above, embassy-commissioned research has put the true population considerably higher, at between around 58,500 and 70,000 depending on the year of estimate. The national Brazilian population grew at each successive census from the early 2000s: from 1,232 in 2002, to 4,388 in 2006, 8,704 in 2011, 13,640 in 2016 and 27,338 in 2022.