On Wednesday June 29th, GeoDirectory in association with the Central Statistics Office, hosted a Webinar on the preliminary Census findings for 2022.
With the Census having to be delayed by a year due to the Covid Pandemic, followed by all the chaos and the consequences of the war in Ukraine, not to mention climate change etc., many are understandably very keen to see what information Census 2022 reveals.
The
insightful results were presented by given by Diarmuid Reidy, Senior Statistician for
the Central Statistics Office. At the very start he praised GeoDirectory and spoke about the key role our data plays in enabling the CSO to carry out the Census to the very best of its ability.
A total of 5,600 staff over a 10 week period did trojan work in ensuring the Census forms could be delivered and collected over a 10 week period. The preliminary results included the following:
- There is just over 5.1 million people in Ireland, 49% of which are male, with 51% female, an almost 8% increase on 2016 figures
- The population is the highest it has been since 1841 and the first time the population has been over 5 million since 1851
- All counties experienced increases in population but the highest growth areas were Longford (+14%), Meath (+13%), Fingal (+11%) and Kildare (+11%)
- Lowest population growth was seen in Donegal (+5%), Kilkenny (+5%), Kerry (+5%) and Tipperary (+5%)
- 38 of the 39 Dáil constituencies had more than €30,000 people per TD
- The Dáil constituency that has seen the highest growth is Meath East (+13%)
- Donegal and Limerick county experienced the lowest growth levels (4%)
Reasons for the increase include:
- Natural increase (births minus deaths) of 171,388
- Net Migration (immigration less emigration) stood at 190,333
- Dublin experienced the highest number of inward migration (+46,559)
- Monaghan experienced the lowest number of migrations (+1,353)
When it came to housing stock to manage the above mentioned population growth, there has been a 6% (120,945) increase in stock to over 2.1 million between 2016 and 2022. In addition, occupied dwellings increased by 9% compared to 2016 figures. Kildare was the county that witnessed the biggest increase in house building, while nationally the number of vacant dwellings has dropped by nearly 10%.
Also covered in the presentation was vacancy rates and reasons for vacancy. This was followed by an interested Q&A session. Questions were asked around various issues such as how we measure migration flows, what role did Covid play in the overall data that has been collated and what metric does the CSO use to collate the number vacant properties in the State.
If you missed it but are interested in hearing the full presentation on the
Census 2022 preliminary results simply click
here.