More people, more immigrants, more babies, more commuters, more religious diversity: post-crash Ireland’s story is of boom-time trends continuing
AT LEAST we still have babies: 365,000 of them born since 2006. The long-term effect of the great crash of 2008 may not be fully apparent from the 2011 census. But the single most striking result suggests that what survives everything is the Irish family. For two decades now, conservatives have been deeply pessimistic about the supposed erosion of “family values”.
But there is still a remarkably resilient faith in the basic value of having children. However much anguish may be in the air, that simple pulse of life remains incredibly strong.
In one way, this should not be so surprising. Throughout the history of the State, even in the worst of times, there have always been many more births than deaths. This basic reality has been masked by mass emigration, but it is telling nonetheless. Even in the 1950s, when the overall population dipped below 3 million, the number of births was as high as it was during the boom years of 2002 to 2006. Even the idea that children were being bred for export didn’t stop us producing them.
But there were reasons to think this attachment to bountiful fertility would not survive the current crisis. It was rooted in Catholicism and as the new census shows, religious and ethical diversity is now an established fact of Irish life. It also seemed to be an aspect of a rural culture, and again the census underlines the reality that Ireland is now overwhelmingly an urban and suburban society, with 62 per cent of the population living in towns or cities and five new towns reaching a population level of over 10,000.
The high cost of having children in Ireland and the pressures on young families from unemployment and high mortgage debt might have been expected to force couples to at best postpone the decision to have a child. That may yet become a common social reality, but so far there is no evidence of it in the census.
If “family values” are defined as getting married and having children – though they should surely be defined much more broadly – it is simply untrue to suggest that they have been undermined by a more open and secular society. Marriage is still highly popular (143,000 more married people added since 2006) and babies are bouncing everywhere. The fastest growing kind of household is the old-fashioned nuclear family: couples with children. (Even though the rate of divorce has risen, so has the rate of remarriage after divorce: the triumph of hope over experience is in full flow.)
What’s especially striking is that so much of the growth in population is happening in the places that have been hardest hit by the crisis: the large stretches of commuterland that became, during the boom years, Dublin’s outer suburbs. Commuting, admittedly, is not just a Dublin-centred phenomenon: while old cities such as Cork, Limerick and Galway have been declining or growing slowly, their hinterlands have been growing rapidly. But the burgeoning of the belt around the capital, from Cavan to Laois and from Fingal to Wexford, is the most striking legacy of the boom. The huge number of empty dwellings may, in their ghostly blight, be stark evidence of the deathly side of the boom, but there are also new communities getting on with things. However problematic the commuter life may be, it is now a permanent part of Irish social reality.
In this, and in many other respects, the most remarkable thing about the census is the way it suggests continuity amid the crisis. In economics and politics, there is an enormous sense of disruption. It feels as if there is a vast gulf between Ireland in 2006 and now. But in demographics, it doesn’t really feel like this. With the obvious and admittedly significant exception of outward migration, the story of the census is of pre-existing trends continuing – more people (a million added in the last 20 years), more immigrants, more babies, more commuters, more religious and linguistic diversity. Perhaps this helps to explain some of the relative passivity of the Irish in the face of the crisis: behind the trauma of economic disturbance, there is a remarkable degree of social stability.
Demographics are always much more than numbers. The temptation to see rises and falls in population as measures of a nation’s vitality is hard to resist. In Ireland’s case, it is arguably justified. The long-term effects of famine and mass emigration mean there are two Irish populations – the one we actually have and the one we should have, if only 19th-century catastrophe and 20th-century failures had not happened. Shifts in the numbers are scrutinised with a certain anxiety, not just about the nation’s vitality, but its very viability.
Thus, the two periods when the State experienced falling populations – the 1950s and the late 1980s – were marked by a sense of depression that went far beyond the economic. In the 1950s, a very low marriage rate combined with large-scale emigration led to concerns about the “vanishing Irish”. In the 1980s, the reversal of the relative optimism of the previous two decades was dramatised in a fall in the population and raised profound questions about the political and economic culture.
This is why the 2006 census gave Ireland such a powerful psychological boost. Its electrifying news was that Ireland seemed to be working its way back towards the population level it might have had if it were a normal country. The population was the highest it had been since 1861.
The idea of a rapidly rising demographic didn’t just measure change, it helped to create it. It added to the “irrational exuberance” of the bubble years in the most direct way. If we had all these new people, didn’t we need more of everything, especially houses? How could property prices ever fall when demand (in the shape of flesh and blood) was growing so rapidly? Between 1996 and 2006, Irish population growth was the fastest in the entire European Union. For those who were sceptical of the Celtic Tiger, this was a pretty powerful rebuttal: how much can be wrong when immigrants are voting with their feet to come here and mothers are making the ultimate profession of faith in the future by having babies?
What’s interesting now is that, if we didn’t know better, we would interpret the 2011 census in precisely the same way. Cut out the rise in emigration and the figures look remarkably similar. Ireland still looks, in the data, like a country on the up, clawing its way back from the demographic disasters of the 19th century. It still looks relatively young (the average age has increased only slightly), dynamic and prosperous enough to continue to attract large numbers of inward migrants, both returning Irish and people from as far away as India. The question this poses is a profound one: why does the official narrative of crisis and cutback correspond so poorly to the social reality revealed in the census? Why, in other words, is an optimistic demographic turned into a pessimistic insistence on the need for everything to shrink?
For if the census provides some reasons to be cheerful, it also poses an enormous challenge. A rapidly growing population demands more of many things – jobs, school places, healthcare, economic growth. This is especially so because more of the population is made up of children and the elderly: for every two people of working age, there is one young or old dependant. How does that fit with the current drive to reduce social services, government activity and investment? Or are we at a peculiar moment when a census that shows so much vitality is to be regarded as bad news? Is Mother Ireland now supposed to weep because she has so many more mouths to feed?