AskBiography Logo   Latest News  Follow Us on Twitter  Follow Us on Google Buzz  Became Fan - Facebook  Subscribe to RSSRSS   Bookmark and Share

Irish American

Irish American
Ethnic group
GroupIrish Americans
Gael-Mheiriceánaigh
Population dateSelf-identified "Irish"
36,278,332
11.9% of the US population (2008)
Self-identified "Scotch-Irish"
3,538,444
1.2% of the US population
Significant populationsThroughout the entire Northeast, the West Coast, South and Midwest, cities of Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco

     Home | Ethnic Group | Irish American



Irish Americans ( ) are citizens of the United States who can trace their ancestry to Ireland. A total of 36,278,332 Americans-estimated at 11.9% of the total population-reported Irish ancestry in the 2008 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. Roughly another 3.5 million (or about another 1.2% of Americans) identified more specifically with Scotch-Irish ancestry.

The only self-reported ancestral group larger than Irish Americans is German Americans. The Irish are widely dispersed in terms of geography, and occupations. Irish American political leaders have played a major role in local and national politics since before the American Revolutionary War: eight Irish Americans signed the United States Declaration of Independence, and 22 American Presidents, from Andrew Jackson to Barack Obama, have been at least partly of Irish ancestry. (See "American Presidents with Irish ancestry" below.)


Warning: simplexml_load_file(http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/-/Irish/American?orderby=viewCount&max-results=10) [function.simplexml-load-file]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.0 410 Gone in /home/askbio/public_html/index_bio.php on line 257

Warning: simplexml_load_file() [function.simplexml-load-file]: I/O warning : failed to load external entity "http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/-/Irish/American?orderby=viewCount&max-results=10" in /home/askbio/public_html/index_bio.php on line 257

Fatal error: Call to a member function children() on a non-object in /home/askbio/public_html/index_bio.php on line 260