Irish people spent nearly €5.5 billion travelling abroad last year.

That’s according to the latest figures from the Central Statistics Office.

More than €3 billion of that was spent on holidays, and the rest was on visiting friends or relatives and business trips.

We took a total of 6.6 million trips abroad in 2011, and more than 86% of them were to destinations within the EU.
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/> 9 million trips within the country were recorded in the 12 month period, and we spent €1.8 billion on them.

Just under half of those were classified as holidays, with visits to friends and relatives in second place.