Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

118. To ask the Taoiseach if his attention has been drawn to the reported incorrect 2016 census figures regarding Ballina, County Mayo, issued by the CSO; and if so, the measures planned by the CSO to correct this matter in view of the damage that this reporting has done to the town. [26571/17]

Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

There have been no incorrect figures reported for Ballina or any other town from census 2016.

Following every census the CSO publishes statistics on the population of towns in Ireland. Up to and including census 2011 this covered 80 legal towns, of which Ballina was one, along with some 744 census towns, or settlements.

Census towns without a legal boundary are defined as a cluster of at least 50 occupied homes with a maximum distance between them of no more than 100 metres and evidence of an urban centre, such as a shop or school within the cluster.

Following each census the boundary of the settlement can be extended outwards to encompass each occupied dwelling within 100 metres. In the case of legal towns such as Ballina the boundary has traditionally been extended out from the original legal boundaryusing the 100m rule. In 2011 the legal town of Ballina has a population of 10,361 while the settlement of Ballina, which took the legal town boundary as its starting point, had a population of 11,086.

The 2014 Local Government Reform Act abolished the existing legal town boundaries, including those for Ballina. Accordingly when drawing the new town boundaries for these old legal towns the CSO applied the UN settlement criteria in full, using the 100 metre criteria. The result was that some towns, including Ballina, lost both area and population while for others there was little effect. This was explained in the background notes that accompanied the results, as follows:

‘Census towns which previously combined legal towns and their environs have been newly defined using the standard census town criteria (with the 100 metres proximity rule). For some towns the impact of this has been to lose area and population, compared with previous computations.’

For 2016 the population of the town of Ballina, defined on the UN criteria without reference to the now abolished legal boundary, was 10,171. In acknowledgement of the difficulties these boundary changes might cause the CSO also published a table showing the population of former legal towns for both 2011 and 2016. The figures for Ballina are as follows.

The CSO acknowledges that the change in approach to how a town is defined has led to difficulties in comparisons between census data in 2011 and 2016. In recognition of this, the CSO has updated the statistical tables to present the data in a way that makes these boundary changes clearer to the user.

We are confident that the new methodology will provide a sound basis for producing accurate census population statistics for Ireland’s towns into the future.