I have been reading the data from the Irish Census of 2011.
A few facts.
The majority of people live in cities. 62%
Dublin alone accounts for 39% of the entire urban population of Ireland.
The ages of 15-29 is the biggest group to decline in five years. This is owing to contraception and hel up by immigration.
38.7 The average age for Cork City compared with 36.1 for the State
32.9 The average age for Fingal
There were 42,854 more females than males in
the State in April 2011 resulting in an overall sex
ratio of 98.1 males for every 100 females.
50/50 The most gender balanced aged groups are 35-39 and 55-59 where the ratio of men to
women is equal
Elderly and living alone
Nearly 28 per cent (136,295) of people aged 65 and over who
were living in private households lived alone. The percentage
increased with age with 36.7 per cent of people aged 75 and
over and 44.2 per cent of people aged 85 and over living on
their own.
Cities, along with the Border and Western regions, had the
highest number of elderly people living alone. It’s the opposite
in the Eastern region where a lower proportion of elderly
people were living alone, particularly in the Dublin commuter
counties.
More elderly women live alone
Elderly people living alone are predominantly women as shown
below. This is because of the higher number of women in the
older population. In fact almost two-thirds of elderly people
aged 65 and over who lived alone were women. This increased
to almost three in every four for those aged 85 and over.
Now this is shocking.
37% Percentage of population who were
married
40% Percentage married in Galway County
30% Percentage married in Dublin City
When examined for urban and rural areas separately the
data shows that there was a higher proportion of single
people in urban (45.2%) than in rural (35.8%) areas.
45% The percentage of people
aged 15 and over in urban
areas who were single in 2011.
Household size continues to shrink
Census 2011 saw the number of private households increase by
12.6 per cent over 5 years to stand at 1,654,208. The number of
people living in private households grew more slowly, by 9.4 per
cent, to 4,510,409.
The reason for the difference was that household size has
decreased. There is now an average of 2.73 persons in each
household, down from 2.81 in 2006. This continues a long-running
trend of households becoming smaller.
And more shocking---birthrate
The average number of children per family is 1.4.
The long-running trend of families having fewer children has
slowed. The average number of children in each family was 1.38 in 2011,
down from 1.41 in 2006.
Same-sex couples
There were 4,042 same-sex couples living together, 2,321
male couples and 1,721 female.
230 were couples with children, with the vast majority of
these being female couples.
Most same-sex couples were cohabiting (3,876) but 166
indicated that they were married couples.
Since same-sex civil unions had only recently been
introduced in Ireland at the time of the census, it is likely
that most of these were married abroad.
Born abroad
Place of birth provides a strong indicator of longer term migration.
The number of Irish residents who were born outside Ireland
continues to increase and stood at 766,770 in 2011 an increase of
25 per cent on 2006, and accounting for 17 per cent of the
population.
The groups which showed the largest increase were those already
well established in Ireland.
The fastest growing groups were
Romanians (up 110%), Indians (up 91%), Polish (up 83%),
Lithuanian (up 40%) and Latvians (up 43%).
Irish, non-Irish
A question on nationality was asked for the first time in an Irish
census in 2002 reflecting the emergence of the importance of
data in this area. Accordingly data series on nationality only go
back this far.
The period between 2002 and 2006 saw very fast growth in the
number of non-Irish nationals in Ireland when the number
almost doubled from 224,300 to 419,733 in just four years.
This most recent inter-censal period has now seen a
continuation of that growth, albeit at a slower pace.
Between 2006 and 2011 the number of non-Irish nationals,
increased by 124,624 persons, or 29.7 per cent, from 419,733
to 544,357.
Polish, the UK and others
A small number of groups accounted for the majority of the
increase. Polish nationals increased by 93.7 per cent from
63,276 to 122,585, accounting for almost half of the total
increase among this group, and overtaking UK nationals as the
largest non-Irish group living in Ireland.
Other groups that showed large increases were Latvians (up
7,274, 54.6%), Lithuanians (up 12,055, 48.9%), Romanians
(up 9,608, 124.8%), Brazilians (up 4,316, 98.4%) and Indians
(up 8,526, 100.8%).
From 2006
94% The percentage
increase in Polish
nationals
101% The percentage
increase in Indian
nationals
98% The percentage
increase in
Brazilian nationals
125% The percentage
increase in
Romanian nationals
http://www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/census/documents/census2011pdr/Census%202011%20Highlights%20Part%201%20web%2072dpi.pdf