Ireland ranks very highly among the world's most powerful passports

Image: https://www.dfa.ie

The Irish passport is very strong in 2018.

The annual Henley Passport Index has revealed Ireland as the sixth most powerful passport in the world.

The index crowned Japan with single most powerful passport in the entire world, allowing its citizens visa-free or visa-on-arrival travel to 190 destinations, compared to Ireland's access to 185 destinations.

The report is apparently "the most rigorous and sophisticated measure of global access," meaning it's fairly comprehensive!

Criteria on the list include which countries you can access with which type of visa, how your passport has changed over the past 13 years, how it compares to other such passports, why it has the level of access that it does and which additional passports would improve your global movements.

Here's the complete top 10:

10. Hungary, Slovenia, Malaysia (180)

9. Iceland (181)

8. New Zealand, Czech Republic (182)

7. Australia, Greece, Malta (183)

6. Ireland, Belgium, Canada, Switzerland (185)

5. UK, USA, Austria, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Norway, Portugal (186)

4. Denmark, Finland, Italy, Sweden, Spain (187)

3. Germany, France, South Korea (188)

2. Singapore (189)

1. Japan (190)

Conversely, there are the countries that yielded the least powerful passports:

You can read the full list HERE.