Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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2625. To ask the Minister for Health the total number of persons who died in the state in each of the past ten years. [41113/25]

Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)
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The Central Statistics Office (CSO) publishes official statistics on deaths in Ireland through Vital Statistics publications. Vital Statistics reports are prepared by the CSO for the Minister for Social Protection in accordance with the provisions of Section 2 of the Vital Statistics and Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act, 1952 and Government Order SI 831 of 2007.

The CSO publishes quarterly statistics on registered deaths as well as a Yearly Summary (available here: www.cso.ie/en/statistics/birthsdeathsandmarriages/vitalstatistics/). These reports record the number of deaths registered in that quarter or year. Information on deaths is only available for deaths which have been registered with the General Registers Office (GRO). Data on deaths based on date of registration is available up to 2024.

Data on deaths by date of occurrence is published by the CSO in the Vital Statistics Annual Report where all figures are classified by year of occurrence (available here: www.cso.ie/en/statistics/birthsdeathsandmarriages/vitalstatisticsannualreport). Deaths not registered during the year of occurrence or in the subsequent 22 months are not available for the Annual Report and not included.

Deaths classified as unnatural deaths must be referred to the local Coroner for investigation. Investigations can take a protracted length of time to complete for various reasons which delays the registration of such deaths in time for inclusion in the Vital Statistics Annual Report. The exclusion of these cases can have a relatively more significant effect on the number of deaths classified to some external causes. The latest Annual Report with data on deaths by date of occurrence is for deaths occurring in 2022.

To account for late registered deaths (deaths registered after the publication of the Vital Statistics Annual Report i.e. registered more than 22 months after year-end of the year of occurrence), the CSO also publishes ‘Revised Deaths Occurring’ data.

Data is final up to 2022 (based on date of occurrence data from the Vital Statistics Annual Report), while data for subsequent years 2023 and 2024 is provisional (based on date of registration). Final data on deaths by date of occurrence for 2023 will be published by the CSO in the Vital Statistics Annual Report 2023 in October 2025. Final data for 2024 will be published in October 2026. To account for late registered deaths, the latest ‘Revised Deaths Occurring’ data (accounting for deaths registered after publication of the Annual Report) is also included in the below Table for years up to 2021.

The Table below provides CSO data on the number of registered deaths occurring annually in Ireland for the period 2015 to 2024. Data for 2023 and 2024 is provisional.