The Central Statistics Office has released a new profile on the results of Census 2016, writes Cillian Sherlock.
The report shows that 87.0% of the population considered themselves to be in “very good” (59.4%) or “good” (27.6%) health.
643,131 people, 13.5% of the population, indicated that they had a disability while the number of carers (people providing regular unpaid help for a friend/family member) increased by 8,151 (4.4%) to 195,263.
Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown consider themselves in the best health in the country as 89.9% put their health at very good/good, while Dublin City came at the lowest percentage of 82.8%.
Almost one in ten people below 45 have a disability and this figures rises by 20% by age 60.
The numbers reporting disabilities rose in all categories, while the largest increase was among those with a psychological or emotional condition which rose by 27,511to 123,515 in 2016, an increase of 28.7%.
Those with a vision impairment increased by 6% to 54,810.
The report also shows that 60.5% of the 195,263 carers in Ireland are women.
More than half of all carers are aged between 40-59.
Irish carers provide more than 6.6 million care hours every week, which equates to 38.7 hours per carers.
83,754 carers provided up to two hours of unpaid care a day, while almost 17,000 carers provided 24/7 unpaid care – 43% of total care hours provided.
The report also showed that educational attainment was much lower for people with disabilities.
Amongst those aged 15 to 50 (inclusive), 13.7% had completed no higher than primary level education, compared with 4.2% of the general population.
37.0% had completed third level education compared with 53.4% of all those aged 15-50.
There were 176,445 persons with a disability in the labour force, giving a labour force participation rate of 30.2% compared with 61.4% for the population overall.
The unemployment rate amongst persons with a disability was 26.3%, more than double the 12.9% rate for the population as a whole.
Members of the public can use the below tool from AIRO and Maynooth University to visualise local census data.
