CENSUS 2011:YESTERDAY'S preliminary results of Census 2011 were based on "summary counts" by the 4,850 census enumerators.
Each enumerator wrote the number of people in each household on to the front of the census form and then prepared a clerical summary of the total for their area.
These summaries were returned to the Central Statistics Office in advance of the census forms themselves, and the results in this report are based on this information.
In the meantime the scanning and processing of the two-million census forms has begun at a facility in north Dublin.
The first definitive results are expected to be published from March or April 2012 onwards.
In total scanners will record 40 million images of census pages and computers will interpret what has been written on the forms.
For the first time the CSO is also producing its own “maps”.
These will pinpoint every dwelling in the State on a two- dimensional grid, providing information about population in a county, electoral area, townland or almost any format that can be defined.
It has been carrying out a great amount of this work with the assistance of the Irish company GeoDirectory.
Pádraig Dalton, the CSO’s director of social and demographic statistics, said the company was helping them to identify buildings across the Republic and link each building to a precise geocode.
This will allow analysis at smaller areas than before to help provide a more detailed analysis than has been available to date.
