Jack Chambers (Dublin West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The CSO's official interactions with the Department of the Taoiseach concerning the census relate to the formal preparation of Government decisions. With the current census, this relates to the decision to approve the holding of a census in 2021, the decision on the census 2021 form content and the deferment of the census for a year due to Covid-19. The CSO, as an independent office, acts on the Government decisions and puts plans and processes in place to undertake the census.

The original Government decision provided for the census to be delivered on 18 April 2021 but due to Covid-19 a decision was taken in September 2020 to postpone the census by a year to 3 April 2022. The intervening period has been used to redesign the census processes to take account of the changed environment. The senior field managers are now in situ, the census field supervisors will start in January and the enumerator application process closed last week. The live census field operation will begin in March 2022.

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