1 in 5 people in Ireland don't search Google in English. Your tradesman website should care.

The Central Statistics Office published the 2022 census results in 2023 and almost no one in the Irish trades read them. They should have. Roughly one in five people living in this country weren't born here. Twenty per cent. In some counties it's higher — Fingal, parts of Dublin city, big chunks of the commuter belt around Naas and Drogheda are well above the national average. And the bit no one in the trade is acting on: most of those people, when they're making a buying decision worth more than a few hundred quid, do their research in their own language first.

If you're a tradesman in Ireland and your website only exists in English, you have made yourself invisible to roughly a fifth of your potential market. Worse, you've made yourself invisible to the segment of that market that is statistically the most likely to be doing home improvements: working-age, settled-in-Ireland families who own or rent property and are spending money on solar, kitchens, extensions, bathrooms, decking, and EV chargers.

The communities, in actual numbers

Here is a rough breakdown of the biggest non-English-speaking communities in Ireland based on the most recent census and post-2022 migration data. These are approximate — populations move around and the data is always a year or two out of date — but the rough size is what matters.

• Polish — approximately 120,000. The largest non-Irish nationality in the state. Long-settled, English-fluent for daily life, but consistently research big purchases in Polish.
• Ukrainian — approximately 110,000 post-2022, the majority arriving after February 2022. Many are still operating primarily in Ukrainian and Russian online.
• Romanian — approximately 80,000. Heavy concentration in Dublin, Cork, and the midlands. Romanian-language search activity for home services is rising fast.
• Lithuanian — approximately 40,000. Long-settled community, similar pattern to Polish — bilingual day-to-day but researches in Lithuanian when committing money.
• Latvian — approximately 20,000. Smaller community, but high-trust word-of-mouth means a single ranking Latvian page can dominate the community's tradesman searches.
• Portuguese / Brazilian — approximately 14,000 and growing fast, particularly in Dublin and Limerick. Brazilian Portuguese is the dominant variant.
• Spanish — growing rapidly, particularly through Dublin and Cork tech employers. Latin American Spanish increasingly common.

Add those up and you're well over three hundred and fifty thousand people whose first instinct when they need a tradesman is to Google in their native language before they switch to English. Some never switch. Some find a tradesman who happens to have a Polish-language page and stop there. Whichever way the journey ends, the tradesman with the Polish-language page is the one in the conversation.

The Polish family in Wexford

I'll give you a real example, because abstractions don't move tradesmen. Conor, the solar installer I work with in Wexford, has had Tradeflo for six months now. His site exists in all eight languages we default to — English, Polish, Romanian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Portuguese, and Spanish. The Polish page for "instalator paneli słonecznych Wexford" (Polish for "solar panel installer Wexford") gets, on average, between fifteen and forty visits a month. Almost no other solar installer in Wexford has a Polish page. So Conor is the only result.

Last September a Polish family in Wexford booked a 6.6kW system off the back of one Polish-language enquiry. The husband told Conor — over coffee on install day, in English — that they had Googled in Polish first because they wanted to read about the SEAI grant in a language they fully trusted. Three other Wexford installers were closer to their house than Conor was. Conor got the job because Conor's page existed in Polish and theirs didn't.

“Conor didn't beat those three local installers on price, location, or even reputation. He beat them because his website was speaking the customer's language before the customer made the call.”

Why this matters more in 2026 than it did in 2016

Ten years ago, multilingual websites for tradesmen were a luxury — nice to have, hard to justify. Two things have changed since then that make them essential rather than optional. The first is the maturity and confidence of the communities themselves. The Polish community in Ireland is now in its second generation. The Romanian community is large and stable. The Ukrainian community, post-2022, is enormous and increasingly settled. These aren't transient populations any more. They're owning property, raising kids in Irish schools, and spending on home upgrades the same way an Irish family would.

The second change is AI search. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and the AI Overviews in Google all respond in the user's language. When a Polish-speaking customer asks ChatGPT in Polish "który jest najlepszy elektryk w Wexford" ("who is the best electrician in Wexford"), the AI doesn't translate the question into English, find an English page, and translate it back. It searches Polish-language web pages and cites them. If your site doesn't have a Polish version, it isn't even in the pool the AI is choosing from.

Same in Romanian. Same in Ukrainian. Same in Lithuanian. The AI search era has made multilingual content a hard requirement — not because the AI is being woke, but because the AI is matching language to language. English content doesn't get cited in a Polish answer.

What good multilingual looks like — and what bad looks like

There is a wrong way to do this, and almost every tradesman who has tried multilingual before has done it the wrong way. The wrong way is: take your English site, run it through Google Translate, paste the output, hit publish. The result is grammatically broken, culturally tone-deaf, and Google can sniff machine-translated content from orbit. It will either de-rank the pages or fail to index them at all. Worse, when a real Polish speaker lands on it, they bounce inside three seconds because the language reads like a child's exercise.

The right way is to write each language version as if you were writing the site for that audience natively. The Polish page mentions the SEAI grant in a way a Polish reader would actually phrase it. The Romanian page references the specific Irish payment and finance options Romanian customers tend to ask about. The Ukrainian page is sensitive to the fact that most Ukrainian readers have been in Ireland under five years and may not know how the Irish trade quotation process works. Each version is a real piece of content, not a translation.

That's what Tradeflo ships on Growth and Gold. Every site at those tiers comes with native, hand-edited content in eight languages by default — English, Polish, Romanian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Portuguese, and Spanish. We can add extra languages if a tradesman has a specific community in their catchment — Arabic, Mandarin, Filipino — but those eight cover roughly nineteen out of every twenty non-English speakers in the country.

The compounding maths of multilingual

Earlier I wrote about how a Tradeflo site has roughly a hundred and thirty service-county pages in English alone. Multiply that by eight languages and you start to see the scale of what we're shipping. A typical Tradeflo build for an electrician in Wicklow ends up with somewhere between eight hundred and a thousand pages of structured, indexable content. Most of those pages will never get a visit. Some of them will get one visit a year. A few will become the single source of compounding traffic that ends up being worth more than the entire English homepage.

The point isn't that every page works. The point is that the system is set up so that any page can work — and you, the tradesman, don't need to know which one will. When the Polish family in Wexford comes looking, the page is there. When the Ukrainian family in Drogheda comes looking, the page is there. When the Romanian property investor in Athlone comes looking, the page is there. You don't have to predict who they'll be. You just have to be in the room when they show up.

What this isn't

I want to be clear about what this approach is not. It is not virtue-signalling. It is not a political statement. It is not an attempt to be progressive or right-on. It is, very simply, basic commercial common sense. There is a measurable market of people living and spending money in Ireland whose buying behaviour involves their native language. Most of your competitors are pretending that market doesn't exist. You can either join them in pretending, or you can put up a page in Polish and watch what happens.

I'm an Irish tradesman from Wicklow. I don't speak Polish or Romanian or Ukrainian. The multilingual content on every Tradeflo site is written by native speakers we commission and pay properly, then maintained as the site evolves. It's not Google Translate. It's not AI slop. It's real content for real people, and it's what gets cited when AI search has a Polish-language question to answer.