OPINION/Garret FitzGeraldThe Census data published on Thursday contains much fascinating material that will take time to absorb and analyse. But for me, at least, the data on migration holds particular interest.
I looked first at my own generation - those born in 1926. By 1961, when I was aged 35, 15 per cent of my contemporaries had already died, half of them having been victims of infant mortality who never reached their first birthday, while many of the remainder had died young of TB.
Moreover two out of every five of those who survived to age 35 had left Ireland - so by the time I was 35 only half of my generation remained alive in the country of their birth. However, 2,000 of these 1926-born emigrants - one in seven - subsequently returned to Ireland, either to employment here or, more recently, on retirement.
That pattern has been broadly true of all those born in Ireland in the years before independence and also for 20 years thereafter. Of the survivors of the somewhat later age cohorts who had to emigrate in the late 1950s and early 1960s, quite a number subsequently found it possible to return home to jobs here during the more prosperous 1970s. This factor, together with a trickle of people of that generation retiring to their homeland later on, at the end of their working lives, meant that of those who emigrated in the late 1950s and early 1960s up to one-quarter have been enabled to spend the latter part of their lives in their own country.
Nevertheless, in economic and social terms the year 1957 was, I believe, the worst that Ireland experienced in the course of the 20th century. Because of persistent economic failure, a mood close to despair gripped the country in that year, when 60,000 people emigrated. Many even began to wonder were we, perhaps, incapable of running our own State?
It was this sense of crisis and doom that led the Government and Civil Service together to decide in 1958 to reverse the totally impractical and futile post-1932 policy of seeking to make Ireland self-sufficient - the policy that had led Ireland alone among European states to experience economic stagnation throughout this decade of dizzying economic growth almost everywhere else in our continent.
It was thus paradoxical that those who were born in that year of despair eventually turned out to be the most fortunate age cohort in pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland. For, benefiting from the policy changes that created the mini-boom of the 1970s, only one in eight of those born in Ireland in 1957 had to emigrate to get employment.
That mini-boom also enabled more than 30,000 Irish emigrants, mainly men with wives and several children each, to return to work here during the course of that decade.
By contrast, those who missed that brief favourable tide by being born later in the 1960s entered the employment market at a time when the economy was suffering from the consequences of the disastrous economic policies embarked on in the late 1970s. As a result of that self-inflicted economic disaster, no less than 30 per cent of those born in 1966 had to emigrate in their late teens or early 20s - a two-and-half times higher proportion than had been suffering this fate a mere nine years earlier.
Happily, however, the restoration of the economy to good health by the end of the 1980s meant that between 1991 and 2002 up to one-third of these emigrants were enabled to return to jobs here, many of them bringing with them, as the earlier generation of returning emigrants in the 1970s had done, their wives or partners and the children who had been born to them during their temporary exile.
This return of Irish emigrants with their families in the 1990s has been a major factor contributing to the fact that one out of 10 children in our primary schools today was born outside Ireland - for half of these are children of returning Irish emigrants and are of Irish nationality, or in some cases are Irish with dual nationality.
This role of children of Irish emigrants, which accounts for a high proportion of foreign-born children in our schools, should also be borne in mind in assessing the significance of the fact that almost 20 per cent of those aged 25 to 44 - our young workforce - are now people who were born outside Ireland.
For no less than half of these are the children of Irish parents who were born when they were abroad, so that only 10 per cent of this young workforce is actually non-Irish. It should perhaps be added that between one-tenth and one-fifth of these non-Irish who are in their 20s are not in fact usually resident here. They are either temporary workers, or just visitors who spent Census night here.
The scale of Irish labour mobility may be judged also from the fact that one-quarter of our 25-44 age group have spent at least a year outside Ireland.
And more than a quarter of a million of these people who have experience of living - and in most cases - of working abroad, have taken up residence here within the past six years, and half of these spent time in the UK before returning to Ireland.
The influx of nationals from other states in recent years has had a perceptible effect on the religious composition of our population. As has been the case for some decades past, the interpretation of data on religious adherence is complicated by the fact that a growing number of people now describe themselves as having no religion, or in a small minority of cases as being agnostics or atheists, or alternatively refuse to answer the question.
Despite this complication, which by 2002 had raised this religiously indeterminate proportion from just over 4 per cent of the population to over 5.5 per cent, the number of Christians who are not Roman Catholics has risen by almost half since 1996, from just under 130,000 to over 190,000.
There has been a 30 per cent increase in the number of Church of Ireland members; an even sharper increase of over 55 per cent in the number of Presbyterians; and a doubling of the number of Methodists and Baptists, while there has been a more modest increase of 7 per cent in the number of Roman Catholics.
The 350 Orthodox believers of 1996 have since shot up to over 10,000; the Buddhists have had a four-fold increase in their numbers to almost 4,000; Hindus have trebled to 3,000; and there has been a five-fold increase in the number of Muslims to 19,000.
In all, the number of people adhering to faiths other than Roman Catholicism has jumped by three-fifths from 148,000 to 231,000. Clearly all this reflects the impact of the substantial immigration of recent years.