Census offers great chance to find out more about our new neighbours

THE Hurley character in the hit American television show Lost is the practical one.

The drama series - currently running for its second season on RTE 2 on Monday nights - centres around 43 survivors of a plane crash who find themselves stranded on a south Pacific island.

It is Hurley who, two weeks after the crash, suggests that they need to conduct a census. As hopes of a quick rescue begin to fade, he convinces the other emerging leaders among the plane crash survivors that one of the steps they need to take, as part of the process of preparing for a longer stay, is to devise some means of ascertaining who, and how many, they are as a group. In fact, since biblical times census-taking has been viewed as a prerequisite to an ordered society.