County Meath has the highest number of Catholic residents since records began according to the latest census figures.

The Central Statistics Office has released the latest publication in its series of Census 2011 results, showing that 160,527 people representing 87.2 per cent of the County Meath population were Catholic.

The recent results also shows that Meath has a population of 967 Irish Travellers or 0.5per cent of the population and 50.2 per cent of those are under 20.

The largest single religion in County Meath was Catholicism with a total of

160,527 persons, the largest number of Catholics in the county since records began. This is an increase of 9.8 per cent since 2006. This compared with an increase of 4.9 per cent to 84.2% of the population for the State as a whole.

The total of those with no religion, atheists and agnostics increased more than six-fold between 1991 and 2011 to stand at 7,990 or 4.3 per cent of the population of the county in 2011.

There were 4,268 members of the Church of Ireland in County Meath accounting for 2.3per cent of the population in the county in April 2011.

The total number of Irish Travellers enumerated in County Meath in April

2011 was 967.

Of these 497 were male and 470 female.