People in three areas in the midlands will be filling in a new-look national census form on Sunday night - 18 months before the rest of us.
The next full national census will be held on April 29th, 2001, but the Central Statistics Office (CSO) is running pilot tests in different parts of the State.
On the basis of the returns it gets from these pilot tests the CSO will ask the Government to sanction new questions for the real thing in 2001.
Volunteers in the electoral divisions of Keeldra, Cattan and Riverstown in north Longford will be asked how much money they earn.
There will be a choice of nine boxes to tick to specify the entire family income. This is a question which has not been posed before.
They will also be asked if they are Irish, an Irish Traveller, British or other ethnic origin. In the full census this question will give the CSO the number of Travellers in the State.
A CSO spokesman said there had been "some criticism from the Travelling community during the last census that we did not make a better attempt to find out exact numbers of Travellers, as we did not ask the question".
Other new questions on the form will seek to determine just how many people are working in the role of carer in families where there is disability or illness.
New, too, will be the question on marital status. For the first time people will be asked if they are divorced, now that divorce is on the statute books.
The pilot test census form will also introduce the question of how many home computers there are and how many of these are connected to the Internet.
Explaining the background to the pilot tests this week, a CSO spokesman said 8,000 census return forms had been sent out. "We are trying out new questions to meet the needs of the census, and based on the returns we get, we will then ask the Government to sanction these questions," he said.
He said the new question on ethnic origin would help to determine how many people who were not Irish had moved into the State in recent years.
The question on income was not to determine the level of wealth in the State, but to determine the level of poverty, he said.
"Then there are new developments like the home computer and we will try, through the test, to see if we can find out what level of homes have computers."
He said the CSO would ask half the volunteers to post their completed forms, rather than using the traditional system of having them collected by a CSO worker.
"It requires around 4,000 temporary employees to carry out a full census and we are wondering what level of returns we are likely to get from the public.
"We have a feeling that for some people the option of posting a census form, rather than having it collected, is a better one and the tests will throw some light on this.
"There is also a possibility that it may be difficult for us to find workers with the ongoing labour shortage and we will try and see how this will work," he said.
The form itself will be different in shape to that in previous years, as the CSO intends to scan in the information on to its computers, he said.
"One thing, however, will not change. No matter the outcome of the pilot tests, we are guaranteeing absolute confidentiality. That will not change," he stressed.