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03rd Mar 2016

INFOGRAPHIC: These stats show how much Irish life has changed since 1916

Carl Kinsella

Times have changed in Ireland.

The Central Statistics Office today released statistics from the 1910s in Ireland, in order to provide a side-by-side comparison of life during the Easter Rising of 1916 with modern life.

The most striking of these were compiled in one handy infographic – offering many insights into how life has changed in the past century.

Perhaps the most notable is that while medical science has advanced to a point of reducing TB deaths from 6471 per year to 25, and bronchitis deaths from 4164 to 22, our susceptibility to suicide has increased exponentially.

People are almost eight times as likely to kill themselves now as they were in 1916.

1916,infographic,for,web,150,dpi2

Infant mortality has also fallen sharply – dropping from 81/1000 in 1911 to 3.7/1000 in 2014. Life expectancy has almost doubled for both genders, increasing from 53 for men and 54 for women, to 78 for men and 82 for women.

Another, perhaps obvious, change is that there are now almost 2,000,000 registered cars in Ireland nowadays – 193 times more than in 1915.

There are also fewer Catholic marriages, and 28 times as many civil marriages – indicating the waning influence of the church in Ireland.

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1916