Census 2022

The 26th census since 1841 was carried out on the night of Sunday, 03 April 2022 (Census Night) in accordance with the Statistics (Census of Population) Order 2020 and in order to facilitate the EU requirements arising from the implementing legislation associated with Regulation (EC) No. 763/2008 on population and housing censuses.

Coverage of the Census

While the census is conducted on a de facto basis, meaning that it counts all persons present in the State on Census Night, the POWSCCAR dataset excludes those persons who were not usually resident in the State at the time of the census. This effectively entails that temporary visitors to Ireland are not included in the dataset.

Conduct of the Census

The 26th census was originally scheduled to take place on the night of Sunday, 08 April 2021. Following advice from the CSO, the government decided in September 2020 to postpone the census for approximately one year owing to the ongoing difficulties arising from the Covid-19 pandemic.

For the purposes of census enumeration, the State was divided into 6 Census Liaison Areas, 46 Regions, 466 Field Districts and 5,100 Enumeration Areas. Census Enumerators were assigned to these Enumeration Areas and, during the five weeks before Census Night, delivered census questionnaires to all dwellings that were expected to be occupied on Sunday, 03 April 2022. Each address within an Enumeration Area was recorded as either occupied, unoccupied or not suitable for habitation.

The collection of completed questionnaires took place between Monday, 04 April and Friday, 06 May 2022.

The data in this report is based on the information handwritten on the census forms. After collection, the census forms were returned to CSO where they were scanned to capture and digitize the handwritten information. This digitized information was then processed to prepare it for publication.

Place of Work, School, College or Childcare Census of Anonymised Records (POWSCCAR)

Anonymised census records relating to persons at work, students and children who were enumerated and usually resident in the State are available to bona fide researchers for the purposes of research on commuting patterns etc. Where the application is granted, the researcher will be signed up as an Officer of Statistics.

Application to Use 2022 POWSCCAR

POWSCCAR data is only available to bona fide researchers who are approved by CSO and signed up as Officers of Statistics. All appointments as an Officer of Statistics are for one year. Should the research require, a new application can be made for additional period(s) of one year. All material proposed for publication which has been derived from POWSCCAR must be approved in advance by CSO.

Application to access POWSCCAR microdata must be made using the microdata application forms on the CSO Researcher Online System for Applications (ROSA) where details on the Research Microdata File (RMF) Policies are also available.

Where the application is approved, all researchers accessing the data will be required to sign a declaration making them Officers of Statistics under the Statistics Act 1993, agreeing to be bound by the confidentiality provisions of the Act. There are severe penalties under the Act for divulging confidential data.

Contact Details

For further information on the data content, please contact:

Census Enquiries Section
Central Statistics Office
Swords Business Campus
Balheary Road
Swords
Co. Dublin

Phone: (+353) 1 895 1300
E-mail: census@cso.ie
www.cso.ie

For further Researcher Online System for Applications (ROSA) or maps, please contact:

Researcher Coordination Unit
Central Statistics Office
Ardee Road
Rathmines
Dublin 6

Email: rcu@cso.ie
www.cso.ie

For further information on Digital Boundaries or maps, please contact:

Tailte Éireann Surveying (Public Office)
Phoenix Park
Dublin 8
D08 F6E4

Phone: (+353) 1 802 5300
https://www.tailte.ie/ or https://osi.ie/contact-us/

POWSCCAR Scope

The Place of Work, School, College or Childcare Census of Anonymised Records cover persons who were enumerated and usually resident in the State on Census Night. Persons enumerated in both private dwellings and communal establishments were included. The file specifically excludes visitors who indicated they were usually resident abroad in Question 7 on the census form.

The category student/child covers persons aged 0 to 14 years and persons aged 15 and over who indicated they were students by ticking box 5 on Question 28 on the census form which requests the person’s present principal status.

Census 2022 Question 28

Place of Work, School, College or Childcare Coding

The location of the Place of Work, School, College or Childcare was coded for each person on the basis of the reply to Question 36.

Census 2022 Question 36

Where the person ticked box 1 or 2 on Question 36, the Place of Work, School, College or Childcare was automatically defaulted to W/M (W=Works mainly at or from home; M=No fixed place of work).
It should be noted that the value ‘W’/Works mainly at or from home in the variable POWSCC_Location was determined by the means of travel (Question 19) and place of work/school/college/childcare (Question 36).

The employer/school name and address were matched against organisation names and addresses on the An Post GeoDirectory. In the case of workers, where the coder could not find an exact match, they coded to a near match on the same street or in the same town as the address on the form. This may have resulted in unusual patterns at low levels of geography such as small areas, but these anomalies should even out at higher geography levels. In the case of students, only an exact match was accepted for the school or college.

The coordinates of the matched building were geocoded to geographical boundaries. In 2022, places of work, school, college or childcare in Northern Ireland were coded in the same way using the Pointer address database. Where the person indicated a work, school or college address abroad, these records were coded to a specific code to indicate that the person was working outside the island of Ireland.

Anonymisation and Recoding

The coded records relating to persons within households were anonymised by stripping off all identifiable information such as name, address and Eircode and by recoding variables where the number of categories could lead to the identification of an individual when combined with other information on the record. Statistical disclosure methods were also applied to POWSCCAR as they have been to all published Census 2022 data.

POWSCCAR Structure and Content

• Table 1 below gives details of the variables in the microdata file and how they are classified.
• POWSCCAR_2022_Codes.xlsx (available in the ROSA system) contains a worksheet for each variable which links the variable values and their associated labels.

For persons who were usually resident in the State on Census Night but were enumerated away from their home, it is not possible to produce household or family characteristics. In this case, the variable will be populated with a 'U' for unknown.

Data Minimisation

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) puts stringent requirements on data processing organisations such as the CSO to protect the personal data of individuals and undertakings. One of the key principles of the GDPR is data minimisation which specifies that only a minimum amount of data should be given.

The following variables are available upon request with a specific case required for each:

1. Year_built
2. Cars_or_vans
3. Citizenship_student
4. Religion_student
5. Able_to_speak_english_student
6. Marital_status
7. Highest_level_ed_parents
8. Family_unemployed_parents
9. Childcare hours

Table 1 - Variables in the Anonymised Place of Work, School, College or Childcare microdata file and the classifications used