'THERE ARE three kinds of lies," Mark Twain quoted former British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli in Chapters from my Autobiography: "Lies, damned lies, and statistics." So what of the latest set of numbers released by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) this week, suggesting that we're having more babies than any time in the past 100 years or so? Does this mark a shift towards baby-making as Ireland bucks the trend emerging in other European countries and brings our reproduction rates up to replacement level?, asks FIONA McCANN
Not necessarily. According Dr A Jamie Saris of the department of anthropology at NUI Maynooth, the figure alone – 75,065 births in Ireland last year, the highest recorded since 1896 – does not tell the whole story. “In a country that is attracting economic migrants, as Ireland has during the last decade, you have folk who are coming into society at the height of their fertility, so you’re seeing probably a lot of first and second kids in those kinds of categories,” he says.
What interests Dr Saris is how such changing demographics get mobilised for debates on public policy. "A popular, largely American-produced discourse right now, based on Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, is that white western Europe is being bred out of existence by migrants, mostly Muslim migrants. And [what is happening in Ireland] is a counter example of that."
According to these latest figures, Ireland is bucking the European trend, with a fertility rate for that period at the necessary replacement level of 2.1 – enough to ensure the adult population is “replaced” by the following generation – for the first time since 1990. Dr Saris sees this strange anomaly in western Europe as contradicting the right-wing theories prevalent in the US, that “at some point western Europe is going to look old and white on one end, and young, Muslim and angry at the other. That concern – that the people who are breeding now are somehow ‘the wrong sorts’ – has a long, long history in the US and is emerging here with a lot of cheerleading from certain sectors of the American right wing who see Muslim migration through Europe as a source of anxiety,” says Dr Saris.
“How that anxiety bridges the Atlantic is what I’m interested in, and how some folk who use terms such as ‘civilisation’ and ‘culture’ are employing demography to think through some of those problems.”
OUTSIDE SUCHanthropological debate, there are practical reasons for compiling such information about Ireland's birth and mortality rates. "Basically, there's a national requirement and a general interest in them," explains Sandra Tobin of the CSO. "Within the CSO they're the building blocks for all our social statistics. They're fed in to create our population estimates. They're used for any employment or unemployment rates, for any data that's compiled per capita."
While population data helps to influence policy in the areas of health and education, this information also has a use beyond Ireland. “We would send the data to European statistical offices, and also to the World Health Organisation – that requirement would be there, and it is used for European comparisons.”
For Dr Saris, however, the information is of more interest in how it can be used to oppose certain arguments about how decreasing birth rates in Europe mark an end to a perceived notion of western European culture. “This is a very interesting counter-example to that, and it shows that you always have to be really careful about the ‘demography is destiny’ kind of arguments.”
The Name Game How Did Ava Become So Popular?
WHAT’S IN A name? Didn’t Shakespeare tell us that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet? All well and good, but as Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner suggest in their book Freakonomics, in the chapter “A Roshanda by any other name”, the name you give your child could have implications for its future. So what are Ava’s chances of getting a third-level education? And what about Jack’s likely household income? Because according to the CSO release, these two – Ava and Jack – were the most popular babies’ names of 2008.
For the first year ever, Ava topped the poll for girls' names, leading to conjecture over what made this name, of purportedly German origin, such a hit in Ireland. Famous Avas of the past include Hollywood screen siren Ava Gardner, who may herself have been behind an upsurge in the name's popularity in the 1950s in the US. In Ireland, Ava has seen a steady climb in the past 10 years, mirroring a similar climb in England, Scotland, Wales and Canada. Could it be the existence of Reese Witherspoon's daughter Ava that sparked this upward trend, or was the more recent birth of Myleene Klass's daughter responsible? Neither is likely, if psychologist Steven Pinker is to be believed. In his book The Stuff of Thought, he refutes the theory that baby names are inspired by public figures or celebrities, pointing to the fact that the name Humphrey never became popular, despite the fact that Bogart was at one stage one of the biggest stars in the Hollywood firmament.
So, how do names become popular? What made Sophie and Ella fall out of favour and slip from the top five position held last year, making way for Ava and Emily? And why is it that, as girls’ names come and go, the top five boys’ names in 2008 – Jack, Sean, Conor, Daniel and James – were also the top five names for 2007, and in the same order? It’s all about trends, influences, and perhaps a little suggestibility: a breakdown of the CSO figures reveals that different favourites emerge when individual, localised areas are isolated.
If you were a male born in Carlow or Cork city last year, for example, chances are your parents went for Ryan, while if accident of birth landed you in south Dublin, you’re more likely to have been called Alex. Grace came first in north Tipperary among other places, though Sophie proved more popular in Meath, and Aoifes were all the rage in Waterford and Leitrim. Overall, Meabh was more popular than Maeve last year, with Diarmuid winning out over Dermot.
Though Jack was the runaway winner overall, Sean took the number one spot in the Dublin region. And while theories about celebrity influence on baby names, neither Shiloh, Suri, Brooklyn, Apple nor Princess Tiaamii made it into Ireland’s top 100 last year – proof, perhaps, that we’re not that easily swayed after all.