Donald Rumsfeld once caused great offence by referring to France and Germany as "old Europe", writes Breda O'Brien
Sadly, much as it pains me to paint Mr Rumsfeld as a prophet, his words are becoming more and more true.
Europe is ageing. As the European Commission delicately put it in a recent Green Paper on demographic change, there is no "demographic motor" driving Europe. Europeans aspire to having 2.3 children, just barely above replacement level, but actually have 1.5 children. The same Green Paper informs us that never in history has there been economic growth without population growth. By the year 2030, there will be 34.7 million people in the EU over the age of 80, as opposed to 18.8 million today.
Ireland is in a slightly better position than most EU countries, but we, too, are heading the same way.
You might have noticed Séamus Brennan suggesting recently that people might be "given the option" to stay on at work after 65. All over Europe, the same issue is arising, which is the need to make people retire later, although the commission prefers to use the euphemism "solidarity between generations". The Green Paper suggests the solution to the greying of Europe lies in "policies focusing on getting people into jobs - especially certain groups in the population, such as women and both younger and older people". They also suggest there must be a focus on innovation and, increasing, productivity. Loosely translated, that means it is all hands on deck, lads, and let's get bailing.
Immigration provides a temporary solution, but not a long-term one. Interestingly, candidate countries to the EU like Croatia and Romania are expecting negative population growth, but Turkey expects to have a 25 per cent growth in population by 2030.
Republicans used to threaten unionists they would "beat them in bed". That phrase begins to acquire a piquant new significance when applied to the EU, surrounded as it is by regions in Europe, Africa and the Middle East which will start to age much later.
There is something rather ironic about a culture addicted to youth growing steadily older. We have an unhealthy fascination with prolonging youth, and spend millions on anything which promises our ageing selves a facsimile of youth. Yet soon young people will become relatively rare, and the elderly will be in the majority. How will our societies meet the challenge? It is an incredibly short-sighted attitude if we think that getting "women, and both younger and older people" into the workplace will solve our problems.
Last year, Catherine Hakim of the London School of Economics published Key Issues in Women's Work. She suggested that even in a society with policies that make it possible for women and men to behave in the same way, many women will choose to opt out of paid work once they have children. Feminist writers like Natasha Walter reacted with fury, and Walter went so far as to say that no society, not even Sweden, offers women the kinds of support that promote real choice.
I have a Swedish friend. We had our first children four days apart. I went back to work five months later. She went back to work when her first child was eight years old, because she spaced three further pregnancies so that she never had to go back to work for more than a few weeks at a time. When she went back, her husband took his paternity leave. Guess what? She no longer works full-time. Granted, she is an unusual Swede, with her "enormous family", but if that is not support for balancing family and work, what would Natasha Walter like? Government-sponsored creche care for 23½ hours a day?
If, as I suspect, Catherine Hakim is right and Natasha Walter is wrong, trying to get more and more women into the full-time workforce will simply hasten demographic decline.
Hakim has always held that about a third of women want to put their careers first, about a third want to work full-time in the home, and about a third want to balance both. However, the ones who are most likely to have the children Europe so desperately needs are the ones who are full-time at home.
The Green Paper says we must decide what value we put on children, and whether we want to really support work-life balance. There is another question. How much do we want to support caring work? There has been much talk since the suggestion that Irish workers could face 70 as a more normal retirement age, that this would permit older people to go on contributing. Again, the underlying premise is that only paid work is valuable.
If we removed tomorrow all the retired people who are carers, or the mainstays of voluntary organisations, we would suddenly realise that paid work is not the only way that people contribute to society.
We have not exactly covered ourselves in glory in this country in the way that we have treated elderly people, particularly in relation to those in institutional care. In addition, the National Council for Ageing and Older People released a report this week which found significant evidence of ageism within the Irish health and social services systems.
I have witnessed it myself in the treatment of elderly relatives and friends. Symptoms are often not investigated, because they are all dismissed as a side-effect of ageing. That incredibly ugly word, "bed-blocker", is never used of younger people, no matter what their illness. Since our health system lurches from crisis to crisis, there is little thought of preventive medicine among the elderly, yet such care might prolong independent living.
However, the vast majority of older people still manage to live independently, and want to go on doing so. If the emphasis is going to be on every available person being in the paid workforce, it will be impossible to replace the informal networks that currently support the elderly.
Certainly, we need to ask what value we place on older people and on children. However, we need to be sure that the questions we ask are not simply based on the economic value of people, or their potential contribution as paid workers. Otherwise, we could just end up detonating that demographic time-bomb a little faster.