Nearly three out of every four male Travellers are unemployed, figures from Census 2002 have shown.
Unemployment among male Travellers measured 73 per cent according to the self-assessed principal economic status question on the census form.
This compares with an unemployment figure for the rest of the State's population of 9.4 per cent. Corresponding rates for females were 63 per cent for Travellers and 8 per cent for the population overall.
Nearly two thirds of the 7,000 Travellers who indicated the age at which their full-time education ceased left before the age of 15, compared with 15 per cent for the population as a whole.
As a consequence, two thirds of all school-leavers among the Traveller Community were educated to at most, primary level, compared with 21 per cent for the overall population.
Out of the total of 23,700 Travellers in Ireland, 11,100 lived in permanent accommodation, defined by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) as a house, flat or a bedsit. However, a spokesperson for the Irish Traveller Movement (ITM) agreed the figure for those in permanent accommodation may be inflated as a large amount of Travellers who dwell in mobile homes on halting sites would consider themselves to be in permanent accommodation.
A spokesperson for the CSO said the definition of permanent accommodation was open to interpretation.
The amount of Travellers aged under 15 years was twice as much as those in the rest of the population. Two out of every five Travellers were aged less than 15 years in 2002 compared with one in five for the population as a whole.