Or maybe they did not understand the question? Perhaps they were living apart the night the census took place… Nevertheless maybe there should be a tribunal into the missing same sex couples in Ireland.
The number of same sex cohabiting couples recorded in the 2006 census was 2,090 compared with 1,300 in 2002. Two thirds of these were male couples.
Read more about the changing Ireland in the CSO Census report.
Interesting to note this.
I don’t exactly recall the formula of words in question, [speakings as head of household, aka the mug who fills out all forms in the house!], but I do vaguely recollect it was not relatively easy to ‘identify’ as a same sex couple. I think you had to ‘think’ about the answers to the question/s in order to explain your relationship. One part of it was who lives in the house, and then there was a question about the relationship between head of household and the person [same-sex] that you live with. I suspect a number of people misread the questioning. I would hope that same-sex couple are not paranoid about filling in anonymous forms. A couple of ‘tickable’ direct questions could go a long way to clarifying this. The figure, however, seems to be no more than the sum of gay male couples you could count on Grafton St or at Blanch Shopping Centre [yup they are there too!] on an indifferent Saturday.
But I’ve always wondered why, there hadn’t been a Hite style report of late in Ireland that would give some stunning results I’m sure, given the rapid transformation of family life in Ireland generally.
Persons 2, 3 etc. were asked to describe their relationship to person one on the form. Options to allow youse flag yourselves as homoskshualists were “husband or wife” or “partner”. (The census form is still online at http://www.cso.ie.)