Over the weekend, something remarkable happened. A century after it was first recorded, the 1926 Census was opened to the public by the National Archives of Ireland, and the response was immediate.
What would typically be around 5,000 daily visitors became more than 834,000 people across the weekend. What might be 50,000 daily page views became over 20 million pages explored.
Families searched for names, historians traced patterns, and people followed their own curiosity into the past.
This was always going to be a significant cultural moment.
On 18 April 1926, the Irish state captured a detailed snapshot of a young nation – its people, its homes, its language and identity. One hundred years later, that snapshot is now publicly accessible for the first time.
From the moment it launched, it resonated widely.
Featured across RTÉ, The Irish Times, The Independent and picked up internationally by The Guardian, the census quickly became part of the national conversation.
At the official launch, attended by the Taoiseach Micheál Martin, and centenarian ambassadors – people who were alive at the time of the census, shared their own experiences. It brought a tangible sense of continuity between past and present.
Micheál Martin – Taoiseach, Brian Dobson – Irish journalist, Patrick O’Donovan – Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media of Ireland and Orlaith McBride – Director of the National Archives of Ireland.
We’re very proud to have been there too and to have played a role in making all of this possible.
Following our work on the National Archives website, and the 1901 and 1911 Census releases, we partnered again to design and build the online experience for the 1926 collection.
Alongside usability and clarity, a key consideration this time was scale.
When a release carries this level of public interest, the platform needs to perform under pressure from the outset. Working in partnership with WordPress VIP, we built an experience designed to handle significant spikes in demand while remaining fast and reliable.
Over the course of the launch weekend, that approach was tested in real conditions, and held up.
The platform integrates a large and complex dataset delivered via the Derilinx platform, but the experience itself is designed to feel straightforward and intuitive.
Search is fast and flexible. Results can be refined easily. Records are presented in a clear, structured way. Users can move between searching, browsing and exploring geographically without friction.
The aim throughout was to make the archive approachable, whether someone arrived with a specific name in mind or simply wanted to explore.
The 1926 Census offers a detailed view of life at the time: a population of just under 3 million, a country where 92.6% identified as Catholic and 18.3% spoke Irish.
What stands out, though, are the individual stories within that detail – names, addresses, occupations, households. Familiar threads that connect directly to people exploring the records today.
Projects like this don’t come along often.
To contribute to something of this scale, and to see it used so widely within hours of launch, has been a genuinely rewarding experience for our team.
The 1926 Census is now live and available to explore.
A more detailed case study is on the way. Subscribe to The Battle of Hearts and Minds – our monthly Ebow newsletter, to get it straight to your inbox.