CENSUS QUESTIONS IN IRELAND SEALED IN TIME CAPSULE

DUBLIN » Can the dead talk to the living? In Ireland, the answer now is officially yes — at least through their census forms.

Earlier this month, when around 2 million households completed their latest population survey, they were allowed to write or draw any message they liked in a blank box at the end. These innovative “time capsules,” as the census makers call them, will be sealed away in the national archive, to be revealed in 100 years’ time.

Many respondents went online right away with their DMS to the future. Some entries were mischievous, others deeply moving.

Leah Wallace, a physics lecturer at Limerick’s Technological University of the Shannon, was among those who felt compelled to share her time capsule. Using a black ink pen, she wrote that she was thankful that she would be remembered. She posted her entry to Twitter:

“The branch of the family tree I am on dies with me. I am an only child, and have chosen not to have children myself. No one will ever do a genealogy search for me. When I die I will be forgotten, most likely … This time capsule is an opportunity for me to once more have someone say my name, think of me, know that I lived, and that I loved my life.”

Eileen Murphy, head of census administration at Ireland’s Central Statistics Office, said that the time capsule was believed to be a world first.

“We attend international meetings with other census organizations and when we say we are doing this they go, ‘What, really? We haven’t heard of that,’” she said.

The capsule, she said, was the brainchild of Cormac Halpin, senior statistician for census assimilation, and followed public consultations about what kind of questions the 2022 census should ask.

One reason for this relative willingness to share personal data with the state, she believes, is that the Irish census still uses paper forms — albeit designed to be machine-readable — and hires friendly human enumerators to distribute and collect them.

“People in a hundred years will see not only the message but the actual handwriting of the people who wrote it, which is such an intimate detail,” she said. “The next census in 2027 will be mostly online, but from the reaction we’ve had this time we’ll definitely have to keep something similar in the future.”

Murphy said that some census filers had gotten creative.

“Some people have put their baby’s hand prints on the form, and you’d wonder if their child will still be alive in a hundred years to see it again,” she said. “Some people have buried physical time capsules in secret places, and used the census time capsule to draw a map showing where it’s hidden. The Irish have always been storytellers, and this is projecting that into the future. I think it’s really caught fire in people’s imaginations.”