April 24, 2006, 5:16 PM — For the first time, people living in Ireland were asked on Sunday to specify their ethnicity when filling out census forms. In many nations, that might not seem unusual. But in Ireland, where poor economic conditions for hundreds of years drove scores of Irish away and deterred others from moving to its shores, ethnicity is only recently relevant.
When the high-tech industry injected a much-needed boost to the Irish economy in the 1990s, for the first time in history, people from all over the world began moving to Ireland. The addition of the ethnicity question to the census, designed not to find out where those people come from, but essentially to count them by the color of their skin, highlights both the good and the bad of the economic boom.
The tech companies in Ireland say they're at least in part responsible for increasing the diversity of Ireland's population.
