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.

Over the last four weeks, hundreds of real-life Hurleys, in the form of Irish census enumerators have been trekking around our highways, byways and suburbs or have been trying to penetrate our fenced-in apartment complexes as part of the most recent exercise in finding out how many of us there are.

There are 4,400 enumerators and each is responsible for about 350 residences. They are easy to spot because, as well as being laden down with their bags of forms, this time around they are also wearing special bright yellow jackets, with Census Enumerator proudly emblazoned on the back.

Last week I had to rescue one who had managed to get herself locked into our office block, which also contains some residential units.

I watched another last weekend in the lobby of a hotel engaged in the painstaking but good humoured task of taking the accommodation manager through what she will have to do to record all those who stay under her roof on Sunday night next.

It has been interesting also to hear countless tales of how the enumerator calling has become a social occasion in many otherwise quiet or lonely lives. This has been the case not only in outlying rural areas but even in the very heart of our cities.

It was striking, for example, how one of the last people to see former Sinn Féin administrator and British informer Denis Donaldson alive was the local enumerator who had spent almost half an hour drinking tea with him on the afternoon before he was so brutally murdered.

The value of collecting census information is self-evident for planners. The prospect of transport infrastructure or public services being sited in a manner best placed to match population patterns is dramatically enhanced if comprehensive and relatively up-to-date census information is to hand.

The dramatic upward trend in our population and economic growth in the last 15 years has inevitably given rise to time lags in the capacity of our infrastructure and services to meet growing needs and expectations in some areas, but these difficulties would be infinitely greater if we did not have census data with which to work. The provision of detailed population figures at local level is key to identifying likely demand not only for public funded services but also for private businesses. A range of incidental changes to other aspects of our lives also occur consequent on the publication of census data. For example, our constituencies are redrawn in order to rebalance democratic representation in Dáil Éireann on the basis of the population shifts revealed in each census.

Some new questions on this occasion include the relationships between persons within households which seek to glean information and ultimately enhance understanding of the increasingly complex range of family or other units in our society. Interesting too, in the context of much political talk about the decline in community activism in Celtic Tiger Ireland, is the fact that this year’s census form includes a specific question on whether within the last four weeks an individual has helped or done voluntary unpaid work with a social or charitable organisation, a religious group or church, a sporting organisation, a political or cultural organisation, or any other voluntary activity.

The data gathered in the census makes a significant contribution to removing the inaccuracies and dispelling the myths which sometimes permeate our public or political debate - this is particularly the case when it comes to considering issues of social or economic change. The 2006 census data, the preliminary headline figures for which will be available in late July, will be particularly useful in that respect.

ONE of the most difficult issues for our politicians and policymakers to get a handle on in recent years has been establishing a true picture of the extent, nature and origin of immigration in recent years.

The suggestion has been made that 750,000 people from different nationalities came to live in Ireland between 2002 and 2005.

However, until we have the 2006 census figures we cannot be sure what this means for overall migration into Ireland during that period. One of the challenges is that while we may have some idea of who has come here, we don’t know how long they have stayed or how many individuals are still living here. Some idea of the nature of immigration can be gleaned from the numbers who have applied for PPS numbers. In the period 2002-’05 the Department of Social Welfare issued more than 400,000 PPS numbers to persons from the EU member states. In 2005 alone, 150,000 PPS numbers were issued. However, again we do not know how many of those who were issued with PPS numbers have since returned to their own country or how many brought family members to join them here.

Leaders or representatives of the various eastern European national groups who have come to Ireland in such large numbers since EU enlargement have suggested that our official measures, such as they are, understate the numbers still here.

On radio recently, the Polish ambassador estimated that the Polish community is now 120,000-strong while others put our Lithuanian population at perhaps 100,000.

The diverse nature of the population being counted next weekend is reflected in the fact that the census form has been produced in more than a dozen languages.

Indeed the CSO has even gone to the trouble of making radio ads in Polish, Russian, Yoruba, Chinese, Urdu and Swahili.

One of the great benefits of the census data is that it represents our best method of accurately measuring the exact extent of immigration. By comparing the results taken from next Sunday night with those of the last census, and taking account of the numbers of births and deaths that have occurred over the same period, the CSO can get an accurate measure of net migration (the difference between inward and out ward migration). Indeed the CSO repeatedly emphasises that the importance of migration as a component of population change is one of the main reasons why a census is carried out so regularly, usually every five years.

When Hurley completed his census of the plane crash survivors and compared it with the flight’s passenger manifesto, he concluded that a stranger had been living in their midst. Our census this weekend is an opportunity to recognise and count as friends the newcomers to our island.