Ireland’s Central Statistic’s Office (CSO) is marking its 75th anniversary. The agency grew from the Statistics Branch of the Department of Industry and Commerce, established at the founding of the Irish Free State in 1922. From that time until the CSO’s 1949 formation the population of the 26 counties remained about 2.9 million, compared to nearly 5.4 million today. The Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) is the equivalent body in the six counties, with just over 1.9 million people today compared to 1.2 million at partition in 1920.

Among the CSO’s latest releases is this visualization of population and migration data:

CSO graphic

CSO data related to tourism are also popular. The latest figures show 0.8 percent more visitors spent 5 percent more money in Ireland during July 2024 compared to July 2023, despite a 6.2 percent decrease of visitor nights in the country. U.S. visitors ranked third (22.7 percent) behind those from Great Britain and Germany.

A Sept. 6 New York Times guest essay about abandoned housing in Ireland relied on a different set of CSO numbers. County Leitrim journalist and photographer Rob Stothard writes:

There are various estimates of the number of vacant and derelict properties across Ireland. All are in the tens of thousands. The 2022 census recorded well over 100,000: long-abandoned rural cottages; empty apartments in city-center blocks or above shuttered shops in regional towns; fading Georgian townhouses in the center of once-prospering rural villages; and “ghost estates,” housing developments that were being built at the time of the financial crash in 2008 and were never completed.

Finally, independent scholar Philip McGuinness relied on the Northern Ireland Life and Times (NILT) Survey in his Irish TImes analysis of nationalist and unionist voting trends in Northern Ireland. He says that 2021 census for the six counties show that 59 percent of people over age 65 are Protestant, compared to 38 percent for Catholics. However, for those under 15, the figures are 33 percent and 49 percent, respectively.