John Gibney

Yeah, the island of 1926 was the Irish Free State, as it then was, three and a half years old.

So in April 1918, or 1926, I should say, when the census was actually taken, just to give you a couple of facts and figures, and I should say, like, well, the granular detail in the sense that the census returns contain that personal information is what's going to be released at, I think, one minute past midnight tonight.

The overall statistics that were collected and collated by the census have been available from the 1920s.

And some of them are worth dwelling on just to give a sense of the Ireland of that time.

Because, as Orla said, in the book, we tried to give a picture.

I mean, people are going to see who lived in Ireland in 1926.

What we were trying to do was give a sense of what that Ireland looked like.

And just to give a couple of facts and figures based on what was collected for the census in 1926.

The Irish Free State we're talking about was the 26 counties.

Ireland had been... The Free State came into existence in December 1922, covering 26 counties.

Partition had been confirmed in December 1925.

So within those 26 counties where the census was conducted, and I should say there were two censuses taken, one in Northern Ireland, a parallel one.

What we're talking about here is the census of the Free State in the 26 counties, and it counted 2,971,992 people.

Breaking that down in terms of gender, 50.3% of them were, or 50.7% of them were men and 49.3% of them were women.

So almost an even gender balance.

It was an overwhelmingly agricultural society.

51.3% of the workforce worked in agriculture.

31.7% of the population lived in a town or a city, but there was only one town or city of more than 10,000 people inland, and that was Kilkenny.

One striking figure that came out of it, for some reason I thought this was fascinating, about 63% of the Irish population lived within 20 miles of the coast.

And if you drill down into the census figures...