YES, WE SAID sexy. As in the Oxford English Dictionary definition of the word:

sexy – Pronunciation: /’seksi/ 2. informal very exciting or appealing, eg, business magazines might not seem like the sexiest career choice.

And the Central Statistics Office might not seem like the sexiest of entities but when Census 2011 is displayed in visual form – as it is by airo.ie, Maynooth University’s All-Island Research Observatory – it IS appealing. And interesting. (Maybe less of the ‘exciting’, per se.) Check these out:

WHERE ALL THE MEN ARE: The redder the shaded area, the more men there are; the reddest areas are where 54 per cent of more of the population is male; the darkest blue represents where less than 46 per cent of the population is male.

WHERE ALL THE WOMEN ARE: The colour key is the same as for the men’s graph.

RURAL vs URBAN: How the population in Ireland’s towns and cities has grown in the last half-century; and how the rural population has not.

WHERE IS EVERYBODY LIVING ON TOP OF EACH OTHER? Oh. There they are. In the small red specks.

PEOPLE DESCRIBING THEMSELVES AS ROMAN CATHOLIC, 1891-2011:

WHERE ALL THE VACANT HOUSES ARE:

WHO ACTUALLY HAS A SEPTIC TANK? Is it just us, or did you also expect there to be more?

And also, ‘sceptic’ tanks? Maybe they are particularly suspicious of the septic tank inspection fee…

… And an extra map that we don’t count in our ‘sexy’, because it makes us sad. This is where the divorced or separated people are in Ireland:

See all of TheJournal.ie’s Census 2011 analysis articles here>

Here are the highlights of Census 2011>