CENSUS FIGURES SHOW 13 per cent of the population or almost 600,000 people in Ireland have a disability.

The figures released by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) today show 48.7 per cent of those with a disability in Ireland in April 2011 were men while 51.3 per cent were women.

Here are some of the main statistics from the CSO results:

• Limerick has the highest rate of disability with 18.2 per cent of persons disabled followed by work with 17.7 per cent of the population disabled.
• The lowest rates of disability were found in Fingal and Meath, each at about 10 per cent.
• The most common disability overall was a difficulty with pain, breathing or other chronic illness or condition which was experienced by 46.2 per cent of all disabled people.
• This was followed by a difficulty with basic physical activities, experienced by 41.1 per cent.

(Image: CSO)

• Over 56,000 disabled people aged over 65 lived alone and just over 69 per cent of those were women.
• Among disabled persons aged 15 to 49, 16.3 per cent had completed no higher than primary level education compared with 5.1 per cent of the general population.
• There were 162,681 persons with a disability in the labour force giving a labour force participation rate of 30 per cent. Of the total of 542,277 people aged 15 and over with a disability, 112,502 or 20.7 per cent were at work.
• The census showed that a total of 187,112 persons or 4.1 per cent of the total population were providing unpaid assistance to others in April 2011.
• It also showed that 4,228 children aged under 15 years were engaged in providing care to others, with the majority of care provided by those caring for less than two hours.

(Image: CSO)

The full Census 2011 profile on Health, Disability and Carers in Ireland can be found here.

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