The “winner” is Guinea-Bissau, a small country in west Africa, from which Ireland imported just €11.95 worth of produce last year. This represented just 0.00000001pc of the total value of our imports. By volume, it was 0.0005 tonnes, or 500g, the equivalent of a loaf of bread or a carton of butter.
The detail was supplied by the Department of the Taoiseach in response to a Dáil question posed by Independent TD Carol Nolan.
When Ms Nolan first asked for a list of the 20 countries from which Ireland received the least imports by value, the department said that “for confidentiality reasons”, the countries and territories from which Ireland buys less than €1m worth of goods were being aggregated into one group. There were 114 in the group.
Last week, the Independent TD resubmitted the question, asking why confidentiality was being applied to the countries.
“A lot of parliamentary questions are not being answered,” she told the Irish Independent.
“I was curious to get the full details in the context of tariffs, which makes these trade questions topical.”
Mary Butler, the Government Chief Whip, said the previous answer had “incorrectly referred to a confidentiality designation relating to countries from which Ireland imported less than €1m. No confidentiality designation applies to this information.”
She added that the Central Statistics Office, which compiles the information, sincerely apologised for the error.
In second place on the list of the countries and territories with which Ireland does the least foreign trade was Mayotte, a small archipelago under French control between Madagascar and the east coast of Africa.
Ireland bought €104 worth of produce from Mayotte last year, weighing one kilogram.
In fifth place on the list was Heard Island and the McDonald Islands, an external territory of Australia and among the remotest places on Earth, which shot to international fame in April when Mr Trump imposed a 10pc tariff on it.
In response, Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese said: “Nowhere on Earth is safe.”
Ireland imported €473.80 worth of goods from the islands last year, according to the information supplied by the department. Other remote and underpopulated islands in the top 10 include Pitcairn, Kiribati, the Falklands and St Lucia.
In terms of bigger countries, we import the least from war-torn South Sudan, from which we bought just €2,824.28 worth of produce last year.
This was only slightly behind the trade levels with Libya, also beset by internal conflicts, from which we imported just under €4,000 worth of produce.
The value of all Irish imports last year came to €134bn, amounting to 45 million tonnes of produce.
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