Peadar Tóibín
Question:968. Deputy Peadar Tóibín asked the Minister for Health the number of people who have died from cancer in each county in the State in each of the past ten years, in tabular form. [71786/25]
View answerTuesday, 16 December 2025
Questions (968)
Written answers
The Central Statistics Office (CSO) publishes official statistics on deaths in Ireland through Vital Statistics publications. Vital Statistics reports are prepared by the CSO for the Minister for Social Protection in accordance with the provisions of Section 2 of the Vital Statistics and Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act, 1952 and Government Order SI 831 of 2007.
Data on deaths by date of occurrence is published by the CSO in the Vital Statistics Annual Report where all figures are classified by year of occurrence (available here: www.cso.ie/en/statistics/birthsdeathsandmarriages/vitalstatisticsannualreport). Information on deaths is only available for deaths which have been registered with the General Registers Office (GRO). Deaths not registered during the year of occurrence or in the subsequent 22 months are not available for the Annual Report. The latest Annual Report with data on deaths by date of occurrence is for deaths occurring in 2023.
Deaths classified as unnatural deaths must be referred to the local Coroner for investigation. Investigations can take a protracted length of time to complete for various reasons which delays the registration of such deaths in time for inclusion in the Vital Statistics Annual Report. The exclusion of these cases can have a relatively more significant effect on the number of deaths classified to some external causes.
To account for late registered deaths (deaths registered after the publication of the Vital Statistics Annual Report i.e. registered more than 22 months after year-end of the year of occurrence), the CSO also publishes ‘Revised Deaths Occurring’ data. The ‘Revised Deaths Occurring’ tables were created to take account of late registered deaths and update figures published at the time of previous Annual Reports. The CSO will continue to revise these figures over time to take account of further late registrations.
The data at the link below on deaths from cancer by county is sourced from the CSO PxStat Table VSA112: Revised Deaths Occurring (data.cso.ie/table/VSA112) for the years 2015 to 2022 to take account of revised data. For deaths occurring in 2023 the data is sourced from the Vital Statistics Annual Report 2023 (CSO PxStat Table VSA101: Deaths Occurring (data.cso.ie/table/VSA101).
Data is provided at the link below for the number of deaths with a cause of death of Malignant Neoplasm (C00-C99) for both sexes, by administrative area of residence (CSO publishes data by local authority administrative areas rather than counties) for the years 2015-2023.
In addition, data is set out at the link below for the standardised death rate per 1,000 population from Neoplasms by administrative area of residence for 2015-2023 (sourced from CSO PxStat Table VSD12: Standardised Death Rates (data.cso.ie/table/VSD12). The (age) standardised death rate is a weighted average of age-specific mortality rates. The weighting factor is the age distribution of a standard reference population. Standardised death rates at local authority level are calculated using the total population of the State for the reference year. Standardised Deaths Rates take account of differences in population structure across counties. For the years 2015-2017 data is presented separately for North Tipperary and South Tipperary, from 2018 onwards data is presented for Tipperary.
The National Cancer Registry of Ireland publishes extensive information on cancer incidence, survival and mortality (www.ncri.ie/en).