1,300 new families in Co Louth

THERE are over 1,000 new families in County Louth it has been revealed.

The number of families in County Louth has increased by 1,287 over the past six years, according to the latest figures from the Census.

The Central Statistics Office (CSO) have just publised their latest profile focusing on Households and Families which shows that there were 33,698 families in County Louth as of April 2016.

Over 40% (39,881) of those over the age of 15 living in Louth at the time of the Census were single which was below the percentage in the State overall (41.1%).

A further 45,663 people (46%) were married (first marriage) - this figure was identical to the percentage nationally.

According to the census, there were 1,658 remarried persons on the county and men were much more likely to remarry after divorce, with 42.8% doing so, compared to just 29.8% of women.

The number of divorcess increased by 432 to 2,971 and accounted for 3% of those aged 15 and over.

There were 5,113 people on the census who identified themselves as widowed making up 5.2% of those over the age of 15.

The 2016 Census marked the first time that same-sex civil partnerships were recorded in the Irish census, following the enactment of civil partnership legislation.

There were 122 people in this category in County Louth, and 4,226 in the State overall.

There has also been an increase in the number of people living alone in County Louth, up by almost 200 from 10,050 in 2011 to 10,260 in April last year.

This accounts for 8% of all those living in private households in the county.

Of these, 3,995 were aged 65 and over, with women accounting for 63.4%.

The full report is available on the CSO website at www.cso.ie/en/census/ along with all the data which is available in a range of interactive web tables, allowing users to build their own tables by selecting the data they are interested in and downloading them in an easy to use format for their own analysis.