Archive is freely available online from 18 April, revealing the lives, occupations and secrets of 2.9m people
The first years of independent Ireland tend to be remembered, if at all, as a dreary monochrome of parochialism and conservatism.
After the blazing dramas of the 1916 rebellion and the 1919-1921 Anglo-Irish war, the infant state seemed to limp into a grey period of insularity, the dream of freedom giving way to anti-climax and drab conformity.
That perception is about to be shaken up with the release of the 1926 census in a landmark initiative that will make the personal details of almost the entire population from that era freely available exactly a century later.
The National Archives of Ireland has digitised the census returns, a vast dataset of more than 700,000 pages that give an intimate snapshot of the nation, and will post them online on 18 April, creating a research trove about the lives, occupations and, in some cases, secrets of 2.9 million people.
