Scouting Ireland
Irish Scouting organisation established in 2004

Scouting Ireland (Irish: Gasóga na hÉireann) is one of the largest youth movements on the island of Ireland, a voluntary educational movement for young people with over 35,000 members, including over 9,000 adult volunteers early 2025. Of the 750,000 people between the ages of 6 and 18 in Ireland, over 6% are involved with the organisation. It was founded in 2004, following the amalgamation of two of the Scouting organisations on the island. It is the World Organization of the Scout Movement-recognised Scouting association in the Republic of Ireland. In Northern Ireland it operates alongside The Scout Association of the UK and the Baden-Powell Scout Association.
The organisation is independent, non-political, and open to all young people without distinction of origin, race, creed, sexual orientation, spiritual belief or gender, in accordance with the purpose, principles and method conceived by Lord Baden-Powell and as stated by WOSM. The aim of the organisation is to encourage the social, physical, intellectual, character, emotional, and spiritual development aspects (known as the SPICES) of young people "so that they may achieve their full potential and as responsible citizens, to improve society". The process of founding the new organisation came on 21 June 2003, after a merger between Scouting Ireland C.S.I. and Scouting Ireland S.A.I. was announced, becoming effective on 1 January 2004. Its national office is at Larch Hill, County Dublin.
The organisation, which is registered with the Companies Registration Office as a company, is headed by the Chief Scout, and governed by a board of directors who are answerable to the Scout Groups as company members. A small professional staff team is led by a chief executive officer.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7438354. VIAF identifies the subject as 152701225. The Library of Congress control number is no2011088351. 3 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2025, 2004 and 2003.
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This entry incorporates text from “Scouting Ireland” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.