Regional Population Projections

Background Notes

Methodology

The regional population projections contained in this release represent a top-down disaggregation of the national projections published in April 2013. The assumptions used in the national model (fertility, mortality and international migration) are regionalised mainly based on recent historical data, while migration between regions is also assessed. The outcome of this procedure is a set of regional population projections based on what would be likely to happen if recent trends in fertility, mortality and international migration were to continue, subject to the overall constraint of the national population projections.

Limitations

Because of the greater uncertainty attaching to regional as distinct from national population projections, the results for individual Regional Authority areas must be regarded as somewhat tentative. The objective of the regional population projections is to determine how the population of the various regions would evolve in the period to 2031 if recent demographic trends were to continue.

More detailed results

More detailed results on population, births, deaths, net internal migration and net international migration under the six regional projection scenarios are available below. The data on births, deaths and net migration are broken down by sex for each year from 2011 to 2031. The population data are broken down by single year of age and sex from 2011 to 2031.

Zip file of detailed population data under the M2F2 scenario in comma delimited format (ZIP 384KB)

Zip file of detailed population data under the M2F3 scenario in comma delimited format (ZIP 384KB)

Zip file of detailed births, deaths and migration data in comma delimited format (ZIP 66KB)  

You can unzip these files using a suitable file extraction utility (the CSO uses WinZip).  

NUTS2 and NUTS3 regions

The regional classifications in this release are based on the NUTS (Nomenclature of Territorial Units) classification used by Eurostat. The NUTS3 regions correspond to the eight Regional Authorities established under the Local Government Act, 1991 (Regional Authorities) (Establishment) Order, 1993, which came into operation on 1 January 1994. The NUTS2 regions, which were proposed by Government and agreed by Eurostat in 1999, are groupings of the NUTS3 regions. The composition of the regions is set out below.