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The Irish Disability Survey is a nationwide survey of individuals carried out by the Central Statistics Office (CSO).
Your participation in this new survey is important, as it will gather data on the issues facing disabled people today.
In 2006, a National Disability Survey was carried out by the Central Statistics Office (CSO), and the results were used to plan services, develop policies, and for research. The Department for Children, Disability and Equality (DCDE) have asked the CSO to run the Irish Disability Survey (IDS) in 2028.
In 2025, the CSO worked closely with DCDE, representatives from across the disability sector, the Disabled Persons Organisation (DPO) Network, other government departments, and researchers to agree and prioritise the content for the IDS. Since January 2026, the CSO took over responsibility of the survey as it moved from the consultation phase, into the development phase. A major piece of work in the development phase is designing the questions that will be asked in the survey.
The CSO are working with an expert panel of people with lived experience to refine the survey questions. This expert panel have given us valuable feedback, so that the resulting questions are easy to understand and will capture good quality data. Working closely with disabled people is a key aspect of the survey development. We are grateful to the members of the expert panel who have volunteered their time to work with us.
As part of the survey development, we have also been working on the sample design to determine how we will select individuals to take part in the IDS. The IDS will use a statistical method called stratified simple random sampling. Individuals will be stratified into groups based on age and responses to the Census 2022 question on long lasting conditions and functional difficulties. The sample will also oversample individuals with long-lasting conditions or functional difficulties to ensures we have sufficient representation in the IDS.
The next part of this development phase will be to run a pilot survey towards the end of 2026. A pilot survey, which is a test of the main survey, will run in the last quarter of 2026 and the first quarter of 2027. What we learn from the pilot will help us understand the feasibility of the design and how people respond to the survey questions.
Find information and contact details on a range of support services that can help with a range of issues
Find answers to common questions about the Irish Disability Survey
Details of data gathered in this survey, how it is processed and protected
Learn about how the CSO work with data, the protections we have in place, and our approach to ethics and transparency
Learn about our data and confidentiality safeguards, and the steps we take to produce statistics that can be trusted by all.