How Irish is Mill Valley?

Here's a question to add to your St. Patrick's Day celebration: How Irish is your town?

There's a wide variation in Bay Area cities. Did you know that Petaluma is more Irish than Boston, a city famous for Irish immigrants? Petaluma's population is 18.5-percent Irish ancestry, compared to Boston's 15.8-percent, according to City-Data.com.

Danville and Mill Valley also can out-Irish Boston. Each city's population is 16.6 percent Irish ancestry. 

San Francisco, host of the West Coast's largest celebration of Irish heritage, the city's annual St. Patrick's Day Parade, has but 8.9 percent Irish-ancestry population, which is still ahead of the Bay Area's largest city, San Jose with 6.1 percent, and more than double the region's third-largest city, Oakland with 4.3 percent.

A Bay Area city that might be expected to boast a large percentage of Irish, Dublin, is 12.0 percent, a figure topped by a number of other Bay Area cities, including Livermore  (14.3 percent), Half Moon Bay and San Rafael (both 13.5 percent), Napa (12.7 percent) and Concord (12.5 percent). 

El Cerrito's population is 8.6 percent Irish, compared with Albany next door at 10.4 percent and Berkeley's 9.0 percent. 

The list below shows the percentage of Irish-ancestry population for 21 Bay Area cities checked by Patch on City-Data.com on Friday, March 16. (The attached chart illustrates the same information.) If your town isn't listed, you can check it at City-Data.com – just enter the city and state and then search for the word "Irish."