Figuring out the future

PRESENT TENSE:BACK IN THE dark days of late-1980s Ireland, when unemployment and emigration were at their height, the then tánaiste, the late Brian Lenihan, in an interview with Newsweek magazine, offered the opinion that, "after all, we can't all live on a small island".

What would Lenihan have made of this week's Eurostat report, which predicts that, by 2060, there will be 6.7 million people living in the Republic of Ireland? That figure represents a 58 per cent increase from the 4.4 million of us currently crammed shoulder-to-shoulder from Malin to Mizen. How will we cope?

Or should we pay any attention to such long-term projections? Imagine for a moment that the Eurostatisticians had conducted the same exercise 52 years ago, in 1956, when Ireland was haemorrhaging emigrants. Would they have predicted the upturn of the 1960s, the snakes and ladders of the 1970s and 1980s, or the remarkable events of the last decade? Of course not. So what would their projections have been for our population in 2008? Two million, perhaps?

According to Eurostat officials, their figures "should be treated with caution as they are based on current population trends". In other words, they're taking those trends and extrapolating them over a ridiculously long-distance timeframe, which seems a dubious exercise at best.

The same report projects dramatic rises and falls for other countries across Europe. The future top dog of the EU, apparently, will be our closest neighbour, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, where the sprightly 78-year-old King William will have 77 million loyal subjects (so long as Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland continue to hang in there). Germany, by contrast, which is currently Europe's big boy with 82 million, will have shrunk to a puny 71 million, lagging behind not just the UK but also France.

Not surprisingly, across Europe each country focused primarily on its own results this week. Predictions of precipitous population decline in central and eastern Europe were illustrated by newspapers in those countries with photographs of parks full of elderly people feeding pigeons. This is the future, the pictures grimly proclaimed. To be honest, I've seen worse dystopias.

But the numbers and the reaction to them tell us a good deal more about contemporary concerns and neuroses over population, fertility and immigration in modern Europe than they do about what life will really be like in 2060. It's certainly indisputable that everywhere in Europe, even in growing countries such as the Republic of Ireland and the UK, the proportion of the population which is above the current retirement age of 65 will increase dramatically, which will in turn place a huge burden on the economically active (and rapidly shrinking) age cohort at work. If you're in your 50s or 60s as you read this, you may have a right to feel smug; yours is probably the last generation which will be permitted to retire at 65.

How well will societies adjust to this new reality of 50-year working lives? Sarah Harper, Prof of Gerontology at Oxford, writing in the London Times this week, predicted a rosy future of more satisfying careers. "As life-long learning and adult education become more widespread, mid-life company directors may retrain as teachers; shop assistants upskill to become company directors," wrote Prof Harper, who appears not to have met many company directors, a species which tends to hold onto its privileges with the ferocity of a pit bull. "Working lives will be punctuated by employment breaks to allow for child rearing, travel, education, elder care, self-employment and leisure," she goes on, to which the aforementioned company directors are likely to respond: "paid for by bloody who?"

The more popular response, though, is the apocalyptic one, predictions of collapsing gerontocratic societies propped up by young migrant labour. "Population growth in Britain will be driven by a combination of immigration and increased births, many of them to women who were themselves born overseas," said the Daily Mail this week in an article headed "Britain's population timebomb", illustrated with a picture of a crowd of what looked like the Mail's idea of illegal immigrants.

Simmering not very far below the surface are fears about the "flagging fertility of white westerners", as articulated by Desmond Fennell in a recent article for this newspaper. Fennell and others see our declining fertility rate as symptomatic of the decline and fall of Western civilisation brought on by secular liberalism. But are they not just as likely to be a consequence of societies adjusting to increased prosperity and longevity? Evidence of declining birthrates in industrialising countries in the developing world would suggest as much.

Fennell's argument arose from another statistical projection, that white people will be in a minority in the US in 2042, because, he wrote, "the white population is not reproducing itself" . And therein lies the danger of this week's apparently harmless statistical data. Such spurious science is grist to the mill of the most atavistic fears: of impure blood; of "swamping" by incomers; of losing a racial struggle. Haven't we been here before?

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Shane Hegarty is on leave