In Reply to: re: 18 to 35 year olds posted by Realist on January 31, 2010 at 20:21:20:

Ahem! You have already cited the fact that 65+ year olds are more favourably disposed towards having the religious run our schools here in Ireland. At present 11% of the population is over 65 years. This means that a mere 110 people expressed this opinion in the 1000-person poll that you have already cited in support of your 'views'. You obviously expect us to believe this 'ludicrous poll' but ridicule another larger poll. By my count 110 is only one third of 327 but yet you cite it with great certainty?

A poll of 327 people will have an error that is quantifiable; just as a poll of 1000 people has an error that is quantifiable to 3.2% plus or minus. At a guess I would say the error is 5 to 6 percent error as these errors plateau very quickly and there are diminishing returns as far as accuracy goes.

The 'error' associated with the number of respondents is much less than the 'error' associated with the way in which the question is posed.

A poll of one person that you mention would have an error that is, theoretically at least, one in 6.9 billion which is the current population of the planet - but again it may depend on the question you ask.

If you ask 'Is black white' I suspect even a poll of just one person will most likely say 'No' - black is not white. But there is still a probability that if you asked a blind person they may just as easily say 'Yes - it's all the same to me' or they might be agnostic and say 'I don't know'.

If you ask 'Is God a woman' of 10 people it's pretty sure that most of them (i.e. a majority) will say 'NO!' too. (Everyone idiot knows that God is male!)

As for the difference between 18-24 and 18-35 year olds mea culpa and that's about an 11-year difference and it may indeed make a significant difference to the results but you would need a much larger sample to tell this for sure. You could be right that the "18-24 age group (those just out of primary education)." as you quaintly put it were "more in favour of the church�s position on schools" but it's unlikely to be that different to the views of the 18-35 cohort who think that abortion should be available here.

It's funny though that it's you who is now questioning the reliability of polls and those talking about them when your first post intimated most clearly that you thought it was the readers of the Irish Times alone who were polled and against having the church run national schools. Even to the extent of making snide remarks about the "so called upper class" - as if they actually read the IT. But it's obvious from even what you have written here that you now realise that your initial premise is just plain wrong and you were just shooting the messenger. But won't openly admit to having made a fairly big mistake in the context of the thread. Blatant dishonesty is a strong characteristic it would seem of those who pontificate from the pulpit about religious matters on this forum?

But we will be waiting for an admission that YOU made an initial mistake - when jumping in with your two big feet - just as we will be waiting for Bishops to apologise for their protection of priests and the ongoing attempt at covering up clerical child abuse that stretches right up to the Pope himself as we speak.

While we are talking about reliability of information - you may be interested to know that primary schooling in this country (i.e. Ireland) typically ends at age 12 so even an 18 year old is some distance from being "just out of primary education". At 18 you could be married with kids, have fought for your country and even been declared bankrupt. In reality a normal 18-year old is far removed from primary school and already in third Level education or at least just out of six years of second level education. But then you didn't know that did you as you don't even live here in Castlebar?

The average age of a woman having her first child in Ireland is about 31 years, it's not surprising that a 60% of the cohort of 18-35 year-olds would adopt a view that abortion should be legalised in Ireland. The figure may indeed be lower if you polled 300 18 to 24-year-olds but the Red C poll only picked the 18-35 year old group presumably in the interests of reducing the error and adding another 11 years to the sample size.