Tourism Ireland has welcomed growth of 11.6% in overseas visitors to Ireland.

The numbers show the country saw its best ever month of October, and also best ever January to October period.

Last month, more than 830,000 arrivals were recorded here.

While from January to October, Ireland saw almost 8.3 million overseas visitors.

This represents an increase of almost 12% - 858,000 additional visitors when compared with the first ten months of 2015.

Niall Gibbons, CEO of Tourism Ireland, said: "It is clear that 2016 will be another record-breaking year for Irish tourism.

"We have seen exceptional results from North America for January to October - up 18% on the same ten-month period in 2015."

There was also a strong increase in British visitors, up almost 12%.

And visitors from mainland Europe also saw a near 10% rise - with markets like Spain, France, Germany and the Benelux countries all recording growth.

"Tourism Ireland has a number of late-season campaigns under way right now, to kick-start our promotional effort for 2017.

"Next week, we will outline our plans for 2017, when we will be pulling out all the stops to ensure that the island of Ireland continues to increase its share of the global travel business", Mr Gibbons added.

And the total number of overseas trips made by Irish residents from August to October also increased by 4.1% to 2,086,500.