Almost 161,000 people provide regular long-term care for somebody with an illness or disability, figures released today show.
The Census figures published by the Central Statistics Office this morning show the figure represents 4.8 per cent of all people over aged 15 and over. More than one in four of these carers provide unpaid help for 43 hours or more every week, and two-thirds of the carers are women.
More than half of all carers (90,544) said they had jobs aside from their carer role.
The figures show that almost 394,000 people, representing 9.3 per cent of the total population, had a long-lasting health problem or disability. Almost 269,000 (62 per cent) of these had more than one disability - up from 188,000 (58.1 per cent) in 2002.
Of the 347,000 persons with a disability living in private households, one in five lived on their own in 2006. The proportion for those aged 65 years and over with a disability was one in three.
Among children aged up to 14, the number of boys with a disability was far higher than the number of girls.
In every category of disability there were more boys than girls, with the greatest difference in the learning or intellectual disability category, where there were 13,658 boys compared with 6,391 girls. In the difficulty in learning, remembering and concentrating category there were 14,017 boys compared with 6,575 girls.
Agricultural workers had the highest incidence of disability (11.9 per cent) while those classified as unskilled follow at 11.5 per cent, with farmers next at 10.4 per cent.
"Higher professionals" and "Employers and managers" had the lowest disability rate of only 5.5 per cent.