There will be much interest this year in the release of the census returns for 1926, the first conducted after the establishment of the Irish Free State, with the details stored in almost 1,300 boxes, containing more than 700,000 return sheets. The returns are due to be released in April, exactly a century after the taking of the census. The overall population then was 2,971,992, a decrease of 5.3 per cent from the 1911 census.

The opening of this material will facilitate all sorts of research. The Irish census online project that culminated in 2007 with the release free of charge of the 1901 and 1911 census returns, to be accessed from all corners of the globe (and overseen by Catriona Crowe, then head of special projects at the National Archives), is widely recognised as the single most successful online educational project undertaken in Ireland. By the end of November 2014 it had passed the billion-hit mark.

The project carried even more weight in a country that, as Crowe observed, “has a depressing record of archival self-destruction”, most notably the

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