Sir, - Every Irish schoolchild used to know that the population of Ireland, according to the 1841 Census, was 8.1 million - not 6.5 million, as the Census 96 leaflet issued by the Central Statistics Office states and illustrates with a graph, in both the Irish and English versions.
Surely this is too great a margin of error, even for the Central Statistics Office? Does it not provide the best argument to date for asking the Department of Education "not to remove history as a core subject from our schools? - Yours, etc.,
Thorncliffe Park,
Dublin 14.