Emigration

The CSO has data on this. They publish annual population and migration estimates, usually for the year to April. The estimate comes out in August or September.

As you'd expect, the most recently published estimate is for the year to April 2022, published last August. Key findings are here. The takeaway:

Immigration over the twelve months: 120,700. Of those:

• 28,900 returning Irish nationals
• 24,300 other EU nationals
• 4,500 UK nationals
• 28,000 Ukrainian nationals.
• I calculate 35,000 rest of the world.

Emigration over the 12 months: 59,600. No breakdown of the emigration figure by nationality is given. But we are told that there was net immigration of Irish nationals of 1,300, from which we can calculate that 27,600 Irish nationals emigrated.

Net immigration: 61,100.

There was a rise in emigration: 59,600 in the twelve months versus 54,000 in the previous 12 months.

Note that emigration means leaving, with the intention of usually residing abroad for at least 12 months; immigration has the converse meaning. So someone going to the UK to do a postgraduate degree, or posted to a job abroad for a year or two, is counted as an emigrant even if they fully intend to return; similarly someone coming to Ireland to study or because of an employment posting that will last 12 months or more is an immigrant.

It's still emigration if they leave for a few years. Irish people are used to the to and fro more than most countries for sure.

Hopefully that is true but I've become wary of such data, from other datasets I've looked into recently when you drill down into it isn't all as it seems. Could just be a case of once bitten though.

Note that these data are estimates.

We don't ask people in airports whether they are migrating or not.

The actual migration figures aren't known until the Census.

As well as the annual estimates, see above, there is also Census data.

Here is the preliminary Census 2022

https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cpr/censusofpopulation2022-preliminaryresults/

Nitpick: Your chart seems to have Ireland at 2.1 or thereabouts as recently as 2010.

Yeah, long-term replacement rate is generally reckoned to be about 2.1 for any society. But that's long-term; in the short and medium term quite big divergences (both ways) are consistent with replacement. A fertility rate of, to pick a figure out of the air, 1.6 is sufficient for replacement if the generation that is of childbearing age is significantly larger than the generation above it. If the fertility rate remains at 1.6 then, in another generation, it won't be sufficient. But these things are very long-tailed.

OP is asking about short-term trends — is the emigration rate going up now? And is the Irish population falling now? No, it's rising (as your own chart shows. If fertility rates remain unchanged from what they are now then (depending on what happens with migration, of course) at some point in the future it will level off and start to fall and no doubt with more data we could model when that point will be. But of course fertility rates won't remain unchanged long term; they never do. So while there is potential for population decline in the future, it's not locked in. And the population is not declining now.

Emigration nowadays is not like it was in the 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's. Most people are emigrating nowadays for the experience rather than having to emigrate because there were no jobs etc. back then.

Things aren't nearly as bad as you are painting them. If they were, people wouldn't be able to take a 'gap year' or see the world 'on holiday'. Things are nowhere near as bad as they were in the 70's and 80's. Absolutely nowhere near.