Statistics reveal a century’s changes in Galway

The Galway of today is vastly changed from the Galway of 1916, according to a fascinating comparison by the Central Statistics Office (CSO).

Life in 1916 Ireland: Stories from the Statistics, highlights how the country, and Galway, has changed in the 100 years since the 1916 Rising.

The CSO uses data compiled during the Census of 1911, and it is compared to the Census results of 2011.

Galway is much less agricultural than it was. The data shows that the numbers of farms in Galway has fallen by 56% – from 31,000 a century ago to just 13,445 today.

The increase in the number of vehicles on the road is another huge change: there was just 243 cars in Galway in 1915, and there were 104,380 cars in Galway at the latest count.

The population of Galway has increased by 38% over 100 years. In 1911 there were 182,224 people living in County Galway. Now there are 68,437 more up to 250,653.

Every other county in Connacht suffered population declines during the past 100 years; while so, too, did many of the border counties.

The vast majority of Galway’s people in 1911 identified as Catholics. Galway is still dominated by Catholics but the numbers of people who describe themselves as having an ‘other’ religion has jumped from 113 in 1911  to 29,317 in 2011.

The rate of illiteracy in Ireland was 8.3% in 1911 and varied widely across the country, with the lowest rate in Dublin and the highest rates in Donegal (16.8%), Galway (15.3%), Mayo (14.6%) and Waterford (11.1%).

More than half (54.1%) of the population in Galway spoke Irish in 1911 but this had dropped to 48.9% by 2011. The full in-depth survey and analysis is available on CSO.ie