The average Irish person earns €470 a week, lives in a bungalow, is most likely to be a manager or administrator if male - or a clerical worker if female. He or she prefers to drive a Ford car and spends most of their personal income on food, drink and cigarettes.
This is the latest picture of Irish men and women in 2001 to emerge from the Statistical Yearbook of Ireland 2002 published by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) yesterday.
Mr Bill Keating, a statistician with the CSO, described the yearbook as a "compendium of information that gives a picture of the country at the end of 2001". Some of the most significant findings were in population and migration within the Republic.
The preliminary total for the population from the 2002 census has reached a 100-year high of 3.9 million, it confirms. The data reveals an Ireland divided in two with the east and south most heavily populated - 2.1 million people live in Leinster, almost half the population of Ireland. Munster has 1.1 million inhabitants while Connacht and parts of Ulster have only 700,000 between them.
There are 30,000 more people living in Dublin's city centre than the whole of Connacht which has a population of 464,000.
The Celtic Tiger was very much in evidence in 2001 when record figures of 1.7 million people in full employment were recorded by the CSO. The increase in the labour force has resulted from increased population of people at working age coupled with higher numbers of working women.
There were 700,000 women employed last year compared to 500,000 five years ago. There are almost 1 million men employed in the Irish workforce of 1.7 million. Just less than 20,000 redundancies were recorded in 2001 with almost 10,000 in the industrial sector.
Employment in agriculture continues to fall and now accounts for only 7 per cent of total employment.
Men still received higher average weekly and hourly wages compared to women working in the same industries in 2001 - for example, the electricity, gas and water supply sector paid male employees an average of €17.48 an hour in 2001. Female employees earned an average of €11.32 in the same sector.
In manufacturing, the weekly average for women was just 68 per cent of that for men. The CSO said this was due to a number of factors such as shorter length of service, less availing of overtime and more part-time working by women.
Regardless of income earned, most money was spent on eating, drinking and smoking, according to data from 2000. Irish people spent €13 billion of their personal income on food, beverages, (alcoholic and non-alcoholic) and tobacco.
Goods and services accounted for the second biggest income expenditure with €9 billion spent on professional (including medical) goods and services in 2000.
Transport claimed €7.3 billion of disposable incomes which was spent on cars, public transport, phones and the Internet.
The number of households with Internet connections quadrupled in the two years to 2000 to reach 263,000. Other figures indicate that out of 1.2 million Irish households more than half live in detached houses and bungalows. But the number of people per household is falling with an average of just three people per household recorded.
Irish people are now living longer as a result of long-term falls in mortality. The average life-expectancy for a boy born this year is 73 years - 79 years for a girl. By 2032, it is expected life expectancies will increase to 77 years and 84 years respectively.
The average length of stay in hospital for a patient is six days. Road deaths are the single biggest killer of men with three times the number of young men killed on Irish roads compared to women - 302 men and 104 women. Although a lesser threat, the number of HIV cases has tripled in the past five years. The most alarming figures were the number of cases of HIV among heterosexuals which rose from 27 in 1996 to 127 in 2000.