Islam & Muslims in Ireland

Islam has been part of Ireland’s story for longer than many people realise, and Muslim communities are today woven into the everyday life of the country. This page offers a short introduction to how those communities came to be, and the place they hold in Ireland now.

An old connection

Ireland appears in Muslim writing as far back as the twelfth century, when the geographer al-Idrisi marked it on his celebrated world map. For most of the centuries that followed, contact was occasional: traders, travellers, and scholars passing through. A settled Muslim community in Ireland is a more recent story, and largely one of the last seventy years.

The first communities

The first Muslims to make Ireland their home arrived in the early 1950s, many of them students who came to study medicine, not least at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin. A number stayed on after graduating, built careers, and put down roots. In 1959 a group of these students founded the Dublin Islamic Society, later known as the Islamic Foundation of Ireland, giving the community its first organised presence.

In those early years there was no mosque. Friday and Eid prayers were held in homes and rented halls until, in 1976, the first mosque and Islamic centre opened on Harrington Street in Dublin. As numbers grew, a former church on the South Circular Road was acquired in 1983 and converted into what is still one of the city’s best-known mosques. Ireland’s first purpose-built mosque followed in Ballyhaunis, County Mayo, in 1987, and communities were taking shape in Galway, Cork, and beyond.

A community takes root

From the 1990s the community grew significantly, as families arrived from many parts of the world, some seeking safety and others opportunity. A landmark of this period was the opening of the Islamic Cultural Centre of Ireland at Clonskeagh in 1996, one of the largest Islamic centres in the country.

As the new century began, that growth continued and new centres emerged to serve it. In 2005, Shaykh Dr. Umar Al-Qadri, who today chairs the Irish Muslim Council, founded the Islamic Centre of Ireland in Dublin 15, giving the growing Muslim community of the area a place of worship and a home for religious, educational, and spiritual life. What had begun years earlier as a small congregation gathering for prayer grew into an established centre serving families across the west of the city, and it remains an active part of Muslim life in Dublin today.

One community, many backgrounds

One of the most distinctive things about Muslims in Ireland is their diversity. The community draws on heritage from across the world, including Pakistan, Nigeria, Somalia, Algeria, Libya, South Africa, Iraq, Palestine, and Morocco, among many other countries, alongside a growing number of Irish people who have embraced Islam. Ireland’s Muslims are neither one nationality nor one culture. What they share is a faith, and a home.

Muslim life today

Today there are mosques and Islamic centres in cities and towns across Ireland, from Dublin, Cork, and Galway to Limerick, Waterford, Athlone, and Drogheda. Alongside places of worship, the community has built schools, charities, youth and women’s groups, and professional networks. Muslims in Ireland work as doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers, carers, shopkeepers, and public servants, taking a full part in the civic, economic, and cultural life of the country. Islam is now among the larger faith communities in Ireland.

A shared future

The Irish Muslim Council believes that Muslims are an integral part of Ireland’s social, civic, and cultural fabric. The community’s story here is still being written, and it is a story of belonging: of people who are proudly Muslim and proudly part of Ireland, contributing to the common good and building bridges with their neighbours.