Dublin, Jul 30 (IANS): Ireland has registered 160,000 foreign traveller arrivals in June, up 180 per cent year-on-year, the country's Central Statistics Office (CSO) said.

The figure is nearly 92 per cent lower than that registered in pre-pandemic June 2019, when more than 1.94 million passengers arrived in the country from overseas, the CSO said on Thursday.

Of all the overseas passengers in June, 85.1 per cent arrived by air and 14.9 per cent by sea, Xinhua news agency reported citing the Office as saying.

Nearly 55 per cent of all overseas passengers came from the European continent: 36 per cent from the UK (not including Northern Ireland), 7 per cent from North and South America and 2 per cent from other parts of the world.

In June, 57,700 passengers arrived in Ireland on cross-channel routes, making the UK the largest source of overseas passenger arrivals for Ireland, followed by Spain (14,500), Poland (12,500) and the Netherlands (10,000).

The CSO figures also showed that in the first half of this year, 539,100 passengers arrived in Ireland from overseas, down 83 per cent compared to the 3.18 million arrivals in the same period of last year.

Since July 19, Ireland has allowed people from all European Union (EU) countries, five non-EU countries, including the UK, and the US to freely enter the country provided they have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19, have recovered from the disease in the past six months or have had a negative Covid test within 72 hours of arrival.

This is expected to further boost the number of overseas passenger arrivals in Ireland in July.