This article is from page 1 of the 2012-05-01 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 1 JPG
PEOPLE born and living in Clare will soon be outnumberd by residents who were born outside the county.
That’s the future that’s in store for the Banner County if the population trends highlighted in the latest 2011 Census of Population bulletin report published by the Central Statistics Office continue.
All because, nearly half of the people now living in Clare were born outside the county. Census returns have revealed that 47.7 per cent of Clare’s population were born outside the county boundary.
This percentage translates into 55,903 of the population of 117,196 not being born in the county, a statistic that places Clare far ahead of the provincial and national average for people the CSO say were “born outside the county of usual residence”.
At a Munster level, the CSO fig- ures have shown that the average for those born outside the county of residence stands at 30.8 per cent of the province’s overall population of 1,246088, while nationally this figures stands at 37.6 per cent.
One reason for the high percentage rate in Clare has been attributed to the lack of maternity services in Clare, which closed in the late 1980s, while the census results have also revealed that 18,522 of the county’s population were born outside the Republic of Ireland, a figure that translates into 15.8 per cent of the overall current population of the county.
The figures were released by the CSO last Friday, with the other standout statistics being the continued growth in the environs of the western corridor, with the populations of Quin and Sixmilebridge jumping by 65.5 per cent and 51.1 per cent respectively.