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It’s Official: Irish People Are The Most Generous In The World

It’s Official: Irish People Are The Most Generous In The World

GoFundMe have announced that Irish people donated the most to their platform per capita in the whole world in 2020.

Mike Wood

Mike Wood

We all like giving, right? We're a nation of givers. In fact, giving might be up there with our great skills as a country, along with winning Eurovision, jumping on sporting bandwagons and, er, Irish pubs.

Now, we've had our famed generosity confirmed back to us. It's official: Irish people give the most to charity per person in the whole world. The news was announced by online charity platform GoFundMe, who counted just shy of 1.5 million donations in Ireland so far in 2020.

That number is three times higher than the record in 2019 and makes us comfortably the highest in terms of donations per capita. The Untied States came in second place, then the United Kingdom, followed by Canada, Australia and the Netherlands. Within Ireland, our most generous city was Galway, who beat our Dublin and Limerick to take the crown - and even on the UK list, their most generous city was Derry.

via GIPHY

Our most popular GoFundMe campaigns were Do it for Dan, which raised over €3.3 million to help a young boy in Laois battling Spinal Muscular Atrophy, followed by A Better Life for Livie, which raised over a million Euros for a small girl in Donegal with the same condition.

In fact, when one-year-old Dan Donoher was unable to travel to the United States to have the treatment that his parents had been fundraising for, they donated a significant amount of the cash that the Irish public had given to them to Livie so that she could have it instead. It turns out that even our charity campaigns are more generous than the average.

"From the front line of the fight against Covid-19 to rallying round poorly kids and everything in between, the compassion shown across Ireland in 2020 has been nothing short of extraordinary," said GoFundMe's senior international director John Coventry.

"We love seeing Ireland top the generosity tables year after year, and while in many ways 2020 has been a year to forget, I hope the solidarity, kindness and generosity that shone through across Ireland and around the world remains in our collective memory."

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Topics: Ireland, Charity