More than 1,000 people across Ireland who will have reached the age of 100 by next spring are being asked to play a role in events being organised to mark the online publication of the 1926 Census of Population records by the National Archives.
Men and women born before April 18th, 1926 have been invited to become centenarian ambassadors and they and their families are being asked to share pictures and stories to honour their appearance in the first census conducted by the Irish Free State.
While there are just over 1,000 centenarians living in Ireland, there will be more who were born here but subsequently emigrated to other countries and they have also been encouraged to play a role.
All told, more than 700,000 individual household returns have been digitised and will be made freely available and fully searchable from spring 2026, with the archive likely to be a huge draw for Irish people and for the wider diaspora.
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Announcing a comprehensive programme to celebrate the centenary release, the Minister for Culture, Patrick O’Donovan, said the release of the archive would be an “historic moment offering an invaluable account of life as the Irish Free State took its first steps as an independent nation. It’s a fascinating snapshot of the foundation of our State, and, more powerfully, a story of families and communities.”
The director of the National Archives, Orlaith McBride, said the programme of events around the launch would include a landmark RTÉ documentary, a theatrical production, major exhibitions in Dublin, London, Boston and across Ireland, and the search for official “centenarian ambassadors”.
“The team at the National Archives has completed unbelievable work in preserving, cataloguing and digitising these priceless documents in-house, using world-class machine-learning technology,” Ms McBride said. “The records will provide a comprehensive and publicly accessible data set of life in Ireland following the establishment of the State.”
She said the centenarian ambassadors – those born before April 18th, 1926 and still alive today – would offer a unique, living perspective on the past century of Irish life.
The ambassador programme aims to capture first-hand personal testimony of the people who will see their own names appear in the soon-to-be-made-public census records.
[ 1926 census to be digitised and made available free onlineOpens in new window ]
Ms McBride said the archive was not “about lists and numbers; it’s about the people living in Ireland in 1926 and all of their descendants today. It’s the story of us, and we want to hear from as many people as possible who are in the unique position of having been recorded in this historic document.”
Mr O’Donovan said it was “particularly moving that we can honour the individuals who were recorded in the census, and who are still with us today, through our centenarian ambassadors programme.”
