10 Most Irish Towns on the SouthCoast with New Number 1

A few years ago, after spending a week in Ireland researching my Irish heritage, I decided to study up on how many Irish have descended upon Massachusetts and her cities and towns.

An Ancestry.com report found that my ethnicity estimate was 61 percent Irish followed by 21 percent Scottish. Where I grew up north of Boston, a majority of the families in my surrounding area were either Irish, Italian, or a mix of both.

How many Irish are in Massachusetts? According to ZipAtlas.com, nearly one in every five people identify as having Irish descent here in the Bay State, while nationally that number hovers around 10 percent.

It was commonplace to see the Irish flag waving below the American flag where I grew up. It's hard to imagine for people who grew up here, but if you replaced all the SouthCoast Portuguese flags with Irish or Italian flags that would be accurate. In fact, I don't recall ever seeing a Portuguese flag waving until I moved down to New Bedford to take the job at Fun 107. I never knew the food I was missing out on!

After ranking the SouthCoast's cities in towns by how Irish each of them were, it is time to update the numbers. There is a new  No. 1 Irish town on the SouthCoast. Let's see if you can guess what it is. In fact, the Irish numbers for this town skyrocketed more than 80 percent over the past four years.

Here are the Top 10 most Irish cities and towns on the SouthCoast.

Here are the numbers from 2022.