Not a baby-name website's guess: the State's own count. The Central Statistics Office publishes every name given to three or more children in the Republic each year, back to 1964. In 2025 that was 23,729 boys and 21,126 girls, and the names that came top were Rían and Lily.
Linked names have a page here with the meaning, the pronunciation and the story. In 2025, 16 of the top 30 boys' names and 10 of the top 30 girls' names are Irish names — a share that has climbed for two generations, as the decade table below shows.
| 1964 | 1974 | 1984 | 1994 | 2004 | 2014 | 2025 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Boys | |||||||
| 1 | John | John | John | James | Sean | Jack | Rían |
| 2 | Patrick | Michael | David | David | Jack | James | Jack |
| 3 | Michael | Patrick | Michael | Conor | Conor | Daniel | Noah |
| 4 | Paul | David | Patrick | John | Adam | Conor | James |
| 5 | James | Paul | Stephen | Michael | James | Sean | Oisín |
| 6 | Thomas | James | James | Shane | Daniel | Adam | Fionn |
| 7 | David | Mark | Paul | Sean | Cian | Luke | Liam |
| 8 | William | Thomas | Mark | Stephen | Luke | Noah | Tadhg |
| 9 | Martin | Brian | Thomas | Patrick | Michael | Harry | Cillian |
| 10 | Gerard | Alan | Brian | Daniel | Aaron | Charlie | Leo |
| Girls | |||||||
| 1 | Mary | Mary | Sarah | Sarah | Emma | Emily | Lily |
| 2 | Catherine | Catherine | Mary | Niamh | Katie | Sophie | Éabha |
| 3 | Margaret | Margaret | Lisa | Laura | Sarah | Emma | Fiadh |
| 4 | Ann | Caroline | Laura | Emma | Amy | Grace | Grace |
| 5 | Anne | Sinead | Jennifer | Ciara | Aoife | Ava | Sadie |
| 6 | Elizabeth | Michelle | Michelle | Aoife | Ciara | Ella | Emily |
| 7 | Caroline | Sharon | Catherine | Shauna | Sophie | Amelia | Sophie |
| 8 | Bridget | Deirdre | Emma | Rebecca | Chloe | Mia | Olivia |
| 9 | Geraldine | Elizabeth | Karen | Amy | Leah | Lucy | Croía |
| 10 | Patricia | Ann | Claire | Rachel | Niamh | Aoife | Éala |
Read across a row and you can watch the country change: the John and Mary of 1964 give way, decade by decade, to names that were not in the top hundred when their parents were born.
Rían for boys (490 registered) and Lily for girls (302), according to the Central Statistics Office's count of every birth registered in the Republic of Ireland that year.
In 2025, 16 of the top 30 boys' names and 10 of the top 30 girls' names have an entry in this site's Irish names A–Z — Rían, James, Oisín, Fionn, Liam; Éabha, Fiadh, Grace, Sophie, Lucy.
The CSO's Irish Babies' Names datasets, which list every name registered three or more times in the Republic of Ireland, every year from 1964. It is official, complete and free to reuse; this page is rebuilt from it. Northern Ireland publishes its own figures through NISRA and is not included.
In 1964: John, Patrick, Michael, Paul, James for boys and Mary, Catherine, Margaret, Ann, Anne for girls. The table below shows every decade since.
Central Statistics Office — Irish Babies' Names ↗, datasets VSA50 and VSA60, 1964–2025, used under CC BY 4.0. Counts are names registered three or more times in the Republic of Ireland; ranks are the CSO's own. Rebuilt from the API each time the site is built, so the year above is the latest the CSO has published.
All Irish names A–Z · How to pronounce them · Girls' names · Boys' names