How many Presbyterian Pakistanis live in Ireland? Are there Chinese-born Travellers? Widowed teenagers? Most pressingly, how many Lithuanian immigrants live in semi-detached houses built between 1910 and 1940?
Now that the final figures from the latest census have been published, answers are finally to hand. As well as providing a wealth of invaluable data on social trends to guide our planning and sate demographers' curiosity, Census 2006, it turns out, is also a repository of unlikely trivia.
Who knew that there are 64 widowed teenagers in Ireland, the youngest of them just 15 years old? Or that the question of nationality could reveal so many hyphens? Almost 3,000 people who were born in Ireland declare themselves to be "Irish-European", as do 27 ethnic Africans, 23 Asians and seven Scots. A total of 1,318 people claim to have no nationality at all.
Immigration has thrown up intriguing marriages of nouns one wouldn't often see making a match: there is one Presbyterian Pakistani, a Brazilian Orthodox believer and a single Greek Muslim.
And while most Poles might be Catholic, the stereotype is upset somewhat by the 91 Polish Muslims, 30 Presbyterians, 23 Methodists and 329 Church of Ireland adherents who were in Ireland on census night, April 23rd, 2006. Their ethnicity is not to be presumed either, with 31 ethnic Asians, 20 Africans and two Scots holding Polish passports.
Figures on religious representation in certain professions show that there are only eight Muslim gardaí, two more than there were Muslims working in mining, quarrying and turf production.
The urban-rural divide is nowhere more evident than in the distribution of certain minorities, with only 1,672 ethnic Africans living in rural areas. The cultural influence of the Chinese on Co Leitrim's mores is likely to be fairly limited - there are only nine of them.
But immigrants are not the only minorities, of course. Consider the single Methodist in Carrick-on-Suir, or the four Presbyterians in Birr, for example. If there was to be an Association of Divorced Maltese Citizens in Ireland, a power struggle could probably be averted by the two eligible members.
On Travellers, the census tells us that the great majority are Irish-born. Small numbers were born in Britain and on the continent, but some trace their origins further afield, with one each having been born in China, Poland and the US.
While there is no evidence, as such, that the State is a cold house for outsiders, it may well be for the 22,525 foreign nationals who have no central heating. A further 336 homes in Dublin have no sewerage facility.
Finally, there are figures that are interesting for no better reason than looking curiously pointless. In this category are the findings that 273 Lithuanians live in houses built between 1910 and 1940, and that there are 140 Orthodox electricians plying their trade in Ireland.
