Misleading: Most Irish visas granted to Indians are for short-term stays, not migration
On Sep. 23, Michael O’Keefe, an Irish activist known for his anti-immigration stance with more than 240,000 followers on X, posted that Irish towns and villages were “looking like India all of a sudden.”
He claimed that the Irish Embassy in New Delhi had issued 31,247 visas to Indian citizens in less than nine months of 2026, an approval rate of 85.6%.
The post also claimed more Indians will move to Ireland in 2026 than the total number of “babies born to Irish mothers.”
As of this writing, the post has drawn close to 300,000 views, 13,000 likes, 3,400 reposts, and 430 comments. Dozens of comments express anti-Indian and anti-immigration views.
However, this post is misleading.
Although the visa decision data published by the Irish Embassy in New Delhi supports the 31,247 figure and the 85.6% approval rate, visa grants are not the same as the number of Indian nationals who moved to Ireland.
The figures include both short-term and long-term visas. A visa grant also does not show that a person entered Ireland, stayed there, or settled permanently.
Each morning, the embassy publishes the outcomes of applications processed by its office up to the previous day. The files can be downloaded from its website.
Visa data misrepresented
The Department of Justice, Home Affairs and Migration (DOJHAM) divides visas granted to Indian nationals into short-stay (Type C) and long-stay (Type D) visas.
Short-stay visas are generally issued for visits of up to 90 days for purposes such as tourism, business meetings, or family visits. Long-stay visas cover stays of more than 90 days, including for employment, study, or joining family.
DOJHAM’s dataset breaks down visa decisions by nationality from 2017 to Aug. 31, 2026. It records 52,870 visa applications from Indian nationals in 2026 through Aug. 31, and 38,106 grants.
Of those grants, 29,830 were short-stay visas and 8,276 were long-stay visas.
In an email to Annie Lab, DOJHAM said its visa team and Freedom of Information Unit treat the dataset as their “single source of truth” for administrative visa statistics.
The department added that the data is updated monthly and may be revised, for example, when visa decisions are overturned.
The national figure (38,106 grants through Aug. 31) is higher than the embassy data (31,247 grants through Sept. 22) presumably because DOJHAM counts applications at every office, not just New Delhi.
Annie Lab also looked at long-term trends in visa decisions for Indian nationals. The data shows short-stay visas have made up the majority of grants except for years when COVID-19 restrictions reduced short-term travel globally.
In 2025, 44,820 short-stay visas were granted, compared with 21,921 long-stay visas, making short-stay visas 67.2% of the total.
The X post is correct that tens of thousands of visas were issued to Indian nationals in 2026, but that number does not show the scale of Indian migration to Ireland.
Babies born to Irish mothers
Available data does not support the other claim that more Indians will move to Ireland in 2026 than the number of babies born to Irish mothers, either.
Ireland’s Central Statistics Office (CSO) published its “Population and Migration Estimates, April 2026” report on Aug. 24. It estimates that 110,600 people immigrated to Ireland in the 12 months to April 2026.
Of these, 55,500 were “Rest of the World” citizens, a category covering people from countries outside Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the European Union.
We also looked at CSO’s data (VSAS80) showing the registered nationalities of the newborn babies in 2025, the latest available figures as of this writing.
Of the 54,125 births, 70.2% (37,982) babies were registered as Irish and 10.5% were UK or EU country nationals (excluding Ireland). The remaining 19.3% (10,467) were labeled as “other nationalities” or “not stated.”
Although registered nationalities do not necessarily indicate the babies were “born to Irish mothers,” the 2025 statistics clearly indicate that the number of long-term stay visas granted to Indian nationals was much smaller than the proportion of births registered as Irish nationals that year.
Considering that 2026 is estimated to have similar trends, the claim cannot be substantiated with available data.
Anti-immigration account
O’Keeffe appears to be a prominent figure in Ireland’s online far-right movement. He has reportedly built a large following on X with immigration-focused content since at least 2020, according to The Irish Times and The Journal.
In 2024, Extra.ie named him as one of the most-viewed figures in Ireland’s anti-immigration online ecosystem. The Extra.ie article said Twitter had suspended his account before reinstating it after Elon Musk acquired the platform.
In January 2025, The Journal reported that O’Keeffe had been charged in connection with a public-order incident related to immigration in Waterford. No pleas had been entered at that stage.
In February 2025, The Irish Times reported that Musk had engaged with and amplified O’Keeffe’s posts on X, exposing them to a much wider audience and helping him gain more followers.
