Most Popular Baby Names in Ireland (CSO 2025)

The top 30 girls' and boys' names in Ireland, 2025

These are the official Central Statistics Office figures, released on 27 February 2026 and based on births registered with the General Register Office between 1 January and 31 December 2025. The CSO counted 10,336 distinct first names in that year.

Ireland's list is not a variation on Britain's. Irish-language names hold a large share of both top tens, and several of them are all but unused in England and Wales.

Girls

Boys

What the 2025 data actually shows

Two firsts at the top

Rían was the most popular boys' name in Ireland in 2025 with 490 registrations, the first time it has led since the CSO series began in 1964, and the first time a name carrying a síneadh fada has reached the top since the CSO began recording accents in 2018. It ended Jack's run, which had been unbroken since 2007 apart from 2016. On the girls' side Lily rose from sixth to first with 302, also a first, displacing Sophie, which fell to joint sixth — its first year outside the top five since 2008.

The spelling rule changes the answer completely

The CSO treats every spelling and variant as a separate name, and it says so plainly in its background notes with an example that is hard to ignore: Jack, Seán, John and Sean between them account for 862 boys, ranked 2nd, 23rd, 29th and 141st. Treated as one name they would be Ireland's most popular boys' name outright. On the girls' side, Hanna with 15 babies and Hannah with 168 would together rank 16th, displacing Lucy. Eoin was given to 53 boys and Eoghan to 41, and they are counted apart.

The fastest risers, by the CSO's own change-in-rank table

Among girls, Raya climbed 114 places from 213th to 99th, Mabel 55 places to 94th, Ríadh 50 places to 80th, Gracie 47 places to 88th and Nancy 36 places to 99th. Among boys, Naoise rose 74 places to 88th, Teidí — the Irish respelling of Teddy — 51 places to 99th, Conall 47 places to 97th, and Levi and Elijah 32 places each. All six of those girls' names and all six boys' names were new entrants to the top 100.

The CSO also publishes growth measured in babies rather than rank, and the two lists barely overlap. Éala gained 95 babies, from 114 to 209, the biggest jump by number; Lily gained 49 and Sadie 42. Raya, the biggest riser by rank, gained only 28 babies, from 20 to 48. Movement near the bottom of a top 100 is cheap.

Fifty years of drift

Mary was the most popular girls' name in Ireland in 1975. In 2025 it ranked 112th with 41 babies, only the fourth time in fifty years that it has fallen outside the top 100. John, the top boys' name in 1975, ranked 29th.

How to use this list

If you are naming a child in Ireland, notice how much of the top 30 is Irish-language: Éabha, Fiadh, Croía, Éala, Saoirse and Róisín among girls, and Rían, Oisín, Fionn, Tadhg, Cillian, Páidí, Darragh and Seán among boys. The same names are rare across the Irish Sea. In the ONS 2025 data for England and Wales, Fiadh ranks 256th, Saoirse 402nd, Tadhg 412th, Oisín 517th and Caoimhe 1,110th. If your family straddles both countries, a name can be entirely ordinary on one side and constantly misspelled on the other.

Decide about the fada before you register, not afterwards. The CSO records accents from 2018 onwards and ranks the accented and unaccented forms as different names. Seán and Sean are two entries in the table and, in practice, two slightly different lives of form-filling.

Finally, treat the published table as complete only at the top. The CSO's ranked series covers names given to three or more babies; anything rarer is not ranked.