Census measures progress but it also depicts chasms in Irish society

SO, HOW are you doing? Did you fill in your census form on Sunday? I hope you did, because without it there are a lot of choices we won’t be able to make.

Of course, the census is critical in answering the above question - how are you doing (or rather, how are we all doing as a country)? But it's also critical to all our future planning, and to the policy choices that are available.

Now, I know Sunday was a particularly tough day, and that, for many, the census was probably a bit of a distraction from the main business in hand.

We shouted ourselves hoarse for Munster in our house that day, and three of our daughters spent the evening planning their weekend in Cardiff. They had the foresight, you see (unlike yours truly) to buy tickets for the final as soon as they went on sale. Back then, no one had any idea that a red horde would be descending on Cardiff on the third weekend of May, but it means that this family, at least, will be well represented when the Heineken Cup finally finds its way to its rightful home.

I don't know, technically, what would happen if the census was being taken the night of the final. In years to come, about three million people will be claiming they were in Cardiff that night, just like the 250,000 people who attended the Munster match against the All-Blacks on that historic day in Thomond Park in 1978 (I have witnesses to prove I was there).

There's no doubt that if the night of the final coincided with census night, it would certainly have caused a blip in the population figures. It might even have cost Munster a few Dáil seats, since the electoral boundaries will all be revised once the census results are available.

Despite the distractions, filling in the form is a vital job for any citizen, for anyone who aspires to be a citizen and for anyone who lives in Ireland.

While the data being collected is essentially about our population, it will also form the core of all discussion about social and economic policy over the next few years. And, for starters, it will be one of the key sets of figures that will tell us how far we've come and how far we have to go.

Of course, the Central Statistics Office collects far more than population figures, and it relies on a range of facts and statistics in developing the picture of how Ireland is doing.

But the population figures are key, and they tell their own story in a whole lot of ways.

In my lifetime, for instance (I was born in 1950) the country's population has increased by one-third, from just under three million people to just under four million. Half of that growth, though, occurred in the first 40 years of my life, and the other half in the past decade. On that basis, one could expect the census taken on Sunday to show a significant jump in population in the four years since the 2002 census.

In 2002, about three-and-a-half million of the four million people living here were born in Ireland and the figure of 3.5 million included nearly half a million returned Irish emigrants. Half of the rest came from the EU (and the vast majority of them from Britain).

There were about 30,000 Americans, 28,000 from Asia, 26,000 from Africa, and around 8,000 people from Australia and New Zealand.

On the basis of our recent experience, and from observation, I reckon we can expect to see not just a jump in the overall population, but also some real cultural differences and challenges.

Some people and I'm one of them will find that exciting. Some people will be afraid of that population growth. And a few people will try to spread fear about it, because we are going to get to know even more people with different skin colours and languages.

But, as I said earlier, the growth and change in our population is only one of the factors likely to influence policy choices in the years ahead.

The CSO will use the census and other data it collects to update one of its most important publications, called Measuring Ireland's Progress. This was first published in 2003 and updated in 2004. The 2005 report is due to be published this year.

IT IS possible to see exactly how we're doing by reading the book, and you can expect some of the findings to get even better as the work is updated. But it's also possible to see at a glance some of the choices we've made. If you had to sum it up in a sentence (the sort of thing a statistician would never attempt to do), the sentence would be this: we're getting richer, and we're getting meaner.

According to the most recent version of Measuring Ireland's Progress, Ireland is the second richest country in the EU, expressed in terms of purchasing power standards.

The employment rate in Ireland rose from 54% in 1995 to 65.5% in 2004. The rate for women increased by more than 14 percentage points over that period, while the rate for men rose by around nine percentage points.

Productivity in Ireland, measured as GDP per person employed, was the third highest in the EU in 2003. Ireland had the second lowest unemployment rate in the EU in 2004 at less than half of the EU 25 average. The long-term unemployment rate was 1.5% in 2003, which was considerably better than the EU average of 4%.

So, we're a lot better off than we used to be.

However, the proportion of Irish people at risk of poverty was 21% in 2003. This was one of the highest rates in the EU. At the same time, in 2001, social protection expenditure in Ireland was 15.3% of GDP. This was the lowest of the then 15 EU countries.

Over 9% of men and women in Ireland were in consistent poverty in 2003. Unemployed people were most likely to be in consistent poverty.

Everyone, broadly speaking, agrees that one of the key ways to tackle consistent poverty is education.

Measuring Ireland's Progress, however, has found, the pupil-teacher ratio at primary level in Ireland in the school year 2001/2002 was one of the highest in the EU, at 19.5. Just more than half of all EU states had a pupil-teacher ratio of less than 15 at primary level.

Early school leavers represented around one in seven of the 18-24 age group in Ireland in 2004. The unemployment rate for early school leavers in this age group was 21.8% in 2004 compared with an average unemployment rate of just around 8% for young people between the ages of 18 and 24.

It's a snapshot, and an important one, and, as I said, the new census will help to update it quite a bit.

The key thing to understand, however, is that the contradiction, between a better-off society and a meaner one didn't happen by accident.

We all need to hope that the extra data available through this year's census will also lead to new, different and better choices.