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This release is categorised as a CSO Frontier Series Output. Particular care must be taken when interpreting the statistics in this release as it may use new methods which are under development and/or data sources which may be incomplete, for example new administrative data sources. For further information on the data sources, linking procedures and limitations of this report, see the Background Notes section.
From 01 January 2018 the CSO has captured the síneadh fada and other diacritics for the first time. This marks the beginning of new series of data. The inclusion of the síneadh fada and other diacritics has an impact in the order of the popularity of some forenames. For example Sean (without the síneadh fada) has always been in the top 100 most popular names for boys. Seán with the síneadh fada is now included in the 2018 data onwards and both spellings are treated as 2 separate names and thus it fell out of the top 100 in 2019. At the beginning of the collection process, names had to be manually inputted on a database from paper records. This was a labour-intensive task and a decision was taken in 1998 to input names without síneadh fadas. When data became digitally available it was decided to continue as before, as any change would result in a break in the series.
It should be noted that for 2017 onwards, the number of births as per the Irish Babies' Names Tables are on the basis of those births registered in the relevant year rather than the number of births recorded in the summary of the four quarters of the year. 2024 Babies' Names tables are based on births registered from January 1st to the 31st of December 2024.
These results are based on an analysis of the first names registered with the General Registration Office (GRO) and the CSO began publishing this series from 1998. All birth notifications in 2024 included the baby’s first name when the statistical return was sent to the CSO. In addition, data on all forenames for years (1964 to 2024 inclusive) with 3 or more occurrences is available on PxStat tables. VSA50 and VSA60 refer - classifying all boys' and girls' names respectively with 3 or more occurrences, by year, number, and rank.
Only the first name was used for this analysis. Babies’ additional forenames were not extracted by the CSO.
Different spellings of a name have been treated as separate names. For example, while there were 53 boys named Eoin, another 51 had the alternate spelling Eoghan. Similarly, in 2024, if you combine the number of girls' named Hanna (22) and Hannah (179) then it would fall into 12th place, replacing Freya. Variants of names and abbreviations have also been treated as separate names. For example, Jack, Seán, John and Sean account for 925 boys. These were counted as separate names and rank 1st, 15th, 29th and 123rd respectively. If treated as variants of John, it would rank as the most popular boys' name. From 2018 onwards names containing accents have been recorded with those accents therefore Seán and Sean are recorded as two separate names.
A name is only considered exactly the same, when the exact same spelling is used for both the baby and either their mother or father. Therefore, if a baby boy is named Seán and their father is called either Sean, Shaun, Shawn, or Seann etc., by the criteria in this publication this wouldn't be included in the grouping of babies which shared the same name as their parents.
Similarly, if a mother is called Kayla, and their baby girl is named Kylah, Kala, or Cala etc. these wouldn't be considered the same name given the differences in spelling.
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