CLARE’s first citizen has stressed the importance of completing the Census while parts of the county have yet to even receive their forms.
Sunday (tonight) is Census Night where every person by law must be entered on a form. The Census had due to be completed last year but was postponed due to COVID-19. Its purpose is to record the people staying at a particular address between the hours of 9pm tonight and 7am tomorrow morning.
Enumerators have delivered forms to more than two million homes, hotels, institutions and other accommodation in recent weeks to ensure the information of everyone in the country is captured. The Central Statistics Office has said a number of households may not have received a census yet and if that is the case they can contact the CSO and retrospectively fill a form in the coming days. Enumerators will return to collect completed census forms starting on 4 April and no later than 6 May.
Parts of Co Clare including Scariff and Feakle have yet to receive their Census forms meaning they are unable to fill them out on the date requested.
Clare TD, Michael McNamara (IND) was critical that parts of the county have not been issued with the forms. “On this Census night, large swathes of the country have not received census forms. The Romans carried out a Census of the Holy Land. Yet, 2,016 years later it seems beyond the capability of the Irish State to do so”.
Speaking at a meeting of the Economic Development Strategic Policy Committee, Cllr PJ Ryan (IND) noted that “quite a lot of grants” issued by various Government departments and agencies are allocated to areas based on their population.
He stated, “It is very important that everybody fills up their Census, sometimes people disregard it and it can have detrimental effect on areas. As everybody here knows, it can bring benefits to areas if they have above a certain population. We need to get the message to members of the public that it is very important to fill out their census forms, their area may lose out if a proper census is not collected”.
Director of Economic Development with Clare County Council, Liam Conneally agreed with the sentiments of the Mayor. “Number one it is a legal requirement to fill out the form, number two the information gathered is anonymised so the data we get to inform ourselves and Government departments is informed by that, it is critical that the numbers on level of education, language capacity, third level, jobs and population that it is filled out in the form. It informs the policy environment that we operate in and we in turn advise our political masters”.
