John Gibney

I mean, so the midlands would have been relatively sparsely populated.

And I mean, the statistics that are available kind of can tell you, they were broken down to tell you all kinds of things.

You know, the state would have been 92.6% Protestant, or Catholic, I should say.

In terms of the original population figure of nearly 3 million that it gave, that was a decrease of about 5.3%, or 168,000 people, from the previous census in 1911.

Now, normally, it's a 10-year gap between the census...

There was a 15-year gap here because the War of Independence took place in 1921.

And the people who normally collected census forms were police officers.

And the War of Independence wasn't really a good time for the police knocking on doors, you know.

So it was a 15-year gap.

And in that 15 years, you would have had a whole host of events that would have whittled down the population by that 5.3%.

You know, the impact of the First World War, the revolutionary years themselves, the withdrawal of the British garrison, even the Spanish flu pandemic happened.

of 1918 and 1919, all took a toll on the population to one degree or another.

You know, of that population, 18.3% put themselves down on the census as Irish-speaking.

Now, there's about 700,000 census forms, but less than 6,000 of them were filled out in Irish.

Yeah, it might be a factor.

And the other side of it is, though, there was a surprisingly young cohort of the population.

The single biggest...

cohort of the population by age was under 14.

That made up 29.2% of all the people in the diversity.

There was a lot of that, yeah.