Jack and Sarah were the most popular baby names registered in 2001 according to the Central Statistics Office of Ireland. There were 930 boys named Jack (3.4% of baby boys) and 650 girls named Sarah (2.5% of baby girls).

The top five names for boys and girls remained the same as last year, although the order changed slightly. There were 5 new entries to the top 100 for boys: Oran, Finn, Tom, Daire and Shaun. Shaun returned to the top 100 after missing out last year.

There were 13 new names in the top 100 for girls: Kellie, Abby, Claudia, Lily, Ellie, Sara, Lorna, Aimee, Alana, Isobel, Margaret, Mia and Hazel. Alana, Isobel, Margaret, Lorna and Aimee returned to the top 100 after missing out last year. Sara also returned to the top 100 having been absent since 1998.

In general, the data shows that in Ireland, girls are given a wider variety of names than boys. The top 100 accounted for 64.9% of girls' names compared with 76.1% of boys' names.

Jack was the most popular boys' name in five regions: Midland, Mid-East, Mid-West, South-East and South-West. Conor was first in the Border region, Sean in the West and Adam in Dublin.

Sarah was the most popular girls' name in the Dublin and Mid-West regions, Ciara in the West and South-East and Aoife in the Midland and Mid-East regions. The first place went to Chloe in the Border while Emma was the top favorite in the South West region.

These results are based on an analysis of the first names recorded on birth returns for registration and vital statistics, begun by the Central Statistics Office of Ireland (CSO) in 1998. Over 93% of birth notifications in 2001 included baby's first name when the statistical return was sent to the CSO. This compares with 93% in 2000, 90% in 1999 and 80% in 1998.

Note that only the first name was used for this analysis. Babies' surnames and additional forenames were not extracted by the CSO.

Names containing accents have been recorded without those accents e.g. Pádraig was recorded as Padraig.

Different spellings of a name have been treated as separate names. For example, while there were 650 girls named Sarah, another 58 girls had the alternate spelling Sara.

Variants of names and abbreviations have been treated as separate names too. For example, Jack, Sean, John and Shaun account between them for 2,219 boys. These were counted as separate names and rank 1st, 2nd, 15th and 100th respectively. If treated as variants of John, it would rank as the most popular boys' name!

Source: Annual reports published by the Central Statistics Office, Ireland.