Ireland has a population of about 5.2 million in the Republic (as of the mid-2020s), with a further 1.9 million in Northern Ireland. The country is far more cosmopolitan than it was a generation ago: the economic boom of the 1990s and 2000s brought significant immigration, particularly from Eastern Europe, and Ireland now has substantial Polish, Romanian, Brazilian, and Nigerian communities alongside longer-established British and other European migrants.
The Irish have a well-earned reputation for sociability and for talking — to strangers, in pubs, at length, about almost anything. This isn't performance for tourists; it's genuinely how things work. A stop at a local pub in a small town often turns into an unexpectedly long conversation.
The country changed rapidly in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Ireland voted to legalise same-sex marriage in 2015 (the first country in the world to do so by popular vote) and to remove a constitutional ban on abortion in 2018. The Catholic Church, which once had an overwhelming influence on Irish society, has lost much of its moral authority following a series of abuse scandals. Catholicism remains culturally embedded but far fewer people practice actively than in previous generations.
Irish (Gaelic) is the first official language, but English is what people actually speak in daily life almost everywhere. Irish is taught in schools and spoken natively in the Gaeltacht communities of the west and northwest, where you'll hear it on the streets and in the pubs. The language has a fierce loyalty among its speakers and a complex political history. Outside the Gaeltacht, most Irish people have some Irish from school but wouldn't claim fluency.
The Irish diaspora is enormous relative to the country's size — an estimated 70 million people worldwide claim Irish ancestry, concentrated in the United States, Britain, Australia, and Canada. This gives Ireland a particular kind of international profile, one that visitors from those countries often find makes their welcome warmer.