Irish birthrate slumps 22% in a decade

For a working couple trying to work, afford a car, rent/mortgage payments, fuel bills, food and clothing it's often out of reach to have more than one kid.

Isn’t that just what I said? Other people have different priorities! Nobody is forcing anyone to work, afford a car, rent/mortgage payments, fuel bills, food and clothing before having as many children as they want and receiving assistance from the State.

There are clearly positives and negatives to both choices, but it’s you who appears to only want to focus on the negatives, as opposed to acknowledging both the positives and negatives of either choice.

I don’t care much for what other people choose for themselves, I just don’t see the point in criticising other people for their choices or proclaiming that one choice is better than the other, when there are clearly advantages and disadvantages in any choices and people who have different priorities will prioritise one over the other.

It's not about priorities. The fact is society makes having kids harder for working people than it is for people who don't work and this is a very bad system.

Victim blaming a whole society, nice work !!

The economic model we have chosen to follow has inevitably lead us to the situation most people find themselves in. Business insisted that they needed all women out working to generate their growth so now we find ourselves in a situation where no one can live without both partners working. Most people never realised what was happening till it was to late to change the inevitable outcome.

Load on top of this quantitative easing which gave the super rich access to virtually free money - which they used to buy up all the assets - especially housing - which they then rent back to the population at massive profit. Think what the average person would do if they could get a zero interest morgage - think what it would do to house prices.

Its lazy thinking to blame the victims of all these trends for the outcomes of financial/political decisions they had virtually no say in. Thats the conservative way though.

Ya but the black people are still having loads of babies and we can't have more of them than white people about the place.

I assume that's the point of this bate thread anyway

Victim blaming? Strange sort of a connotation, but there was no victim blaming whatsoever in my post. In order for that to be true, there’d have to be victims, and there aren’t. I have no idea whom you’re even referring to as victims tbh.

The vast majority of people can, and do live, and some manage to live in far better circumstances than others, regardless of whether it is a couple with both people working, a couple with children with both parents working, or a couple where one of them is working and the other is not, with or without children.

To give you some idea of what I mean, and basing it on statistical evidence rather than anecdotal evidence - while it might well have been successive Government’s agenda to have everyone in employment, and there’s nothing wrong with that; at the individual household level, things haven’t quite gone according to the Government’s plans -

• More than half (53%) of women aged 15 years and over were in the labour force (at work or unemployed) in 2019, a slight increase on the proportion from 2009 of 53.4%.
• The proportion of men in the labour force over the same time period dropped from 72.6% to 67.1%.
• More than half (54.8%) of those who were at work in 2019 were men while 57.7% of people who were unemployed were men.
• Nearly all of the people (94.3%) who were looking after home or family in 2019 were women, although the number of men in this grouping more than doubled in the ten years up to 2019, rising from 7,000 to 19,900.
• The number of women looking after home/family dropped sharply from 527,100 in 2009 to 329,600 in 2019.
• The number of women who described themselves as retired trebled from 87,800 to 287,300 between 2009 and 2019.

https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-wamii/womenandmeninireland2019/work/

IT’s desperately lazy thinking to view people’s circumstances through the lens of victimhood, but I understand why you do it rather than doing even the slightest bit of research which would run counter to the narratives about other people which you choose to believe in.

Yeah but aren’t you kind of ignoring the fact that women also want to work? It seems that you are making it out that the modern economy has kind of convinced and cajoled women into working, as if they have no agency of their own in that decision. Women don’t want to hold down a job because corporations demand it — they want to have ambitions of their own and pursue self-fulfilment that goes beyond firing out babies. Not only that, there is also the element of not being reliant on a man to secure their income and not be left high and dry when the man scuttles off with a mistress.

I wouldn't disagree with that at all. However business did require women to enter the job market to support continuous growth in the economy, when birth rates started to decline some decades ago. The upshot for everyone is that almost all families now need two wage earners to survive.

When I was setting out it was possible for me and my wife to take on a mortgage having raised my own deposit and save a full wage at the same time, whilst both of us earning very modest wages. Such an achievement is now beyond the reach of anyone in the same position (average worker in their 20's) which shows the cummulative impacts of the shifts in the the economy since the 1990's.

There is a tendency for people, such as One Eyed Jack, to gloss over the economic tides which have landed us in a situation where many cannot afford to buy houses and raise families - prefering the easy answer of blaming it on a feckless youth who prefer coffees and avocados to saving for a mortgage. I listen to my own mother doing exactly the same thing - blaming the young for been feckless and ignoring the declining wages and spiraling house prices which are beyond the control of the average young person.

At the risk of pointing out the blatantly obvious, your mam grew up in the time you’re saying businesses required women to enter the jobs market to support continuous growth in the economy, when birth rates started to decline some decades ago. The fact that you did alright for yourself is surely evidence that your mam may have been onto something! 🤔

Ireland in the time when you were growing up and were able to save a deposit for a mortgage is no different than the Ireland of today. Rather than glossing over economic tides, I’m wondering did we grow up in the same country around the same time? I think we did, but obviously we have different perspectives. Some of these examples were a little before my time, but they were definitely within your mam’s time when women DID work; the issue was they would generally speaking only have earned about half as much as men. But just for a wee trip down memory lane, and you’ll see that the Ireland of today is really no different than Ireland in the 70’s and 80’s:

1966 -

https://www.rte.ie/archives/exhibitions/894-house-and-home/139163-housing-conditions-in-dublin/

1969 -

https://www.rte.ie/archives/2014/1124/662158-squatting-in-dublin/

1974 -

https://www.rte.ie/archives/2014/1017/652836-housewives-protest-against-rising-food-prices/

1970 - 1980 -

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/1970s-ireland-when-old-ideas-met-new-affluence-1.558602

1980 -

https://www.rte.ie/archives/2020/0108/1105084-paye-protest/

1982 -

https://www.rte.ie/archives/2017/0517/875958-16-000-march-over-tax/

1980 - 1990 -

https://www.irishexaminer.com/business/arid-20266777.html

The upshot was never that almost all families need two wage earners to survive, and that’s not even needed today. What you’re trying to lay at the foot of Government is the aspirations and choices of individuals. It’s why in spite of Governments best efforts, things haven’t ever gone according to Governments plans. Each generation has higher expectations than the last, and living standards have increased accordingly.

Just like you could afford to save for a deposit for a mortgage in your time, there are plenty of people who can do that today, and just like there were plenty of people who couldn’t afford to save for a deposit and a mortgage, there are plenty of people who can’t do that today.

Btw, even I got that you weren’t referring to women who choose to work. Your whole argument was based around the group of people in Irish society who feel they have no choice but to work, in order to fund the lifestyle they aspire to, that they can ill-afford already, and making the point that they can’t afford to have children on top of everything else. Well no, they can’t, sacrifices, sometimes significant, have to be made somewhere in order to have anything they want, whether it’s their own property, or children, or whatever it is. I’m not so petty that I’d criticise anyone for silly stuff like avocados or phones or whatever, that’s just small stuff that I see touted as “money saving ideas” on Eddie Hobbs style programmes on RTE. Meaningless shyte.

It did remind me all the same of the Government’s continuing, and largely failing efforts to encourage everyone into the workplace though. In fairness that’s probably the only thing we’ll agree on. The reason they’re failing though is because they can’t make people work who don’t want to, people who couldn’t care less about the Government’s plans for economic growth and all the rest of it, because their priorities are their families -

https://www.newstalk.com/news/feminism-has-huge-problem-wanting-women-to-work-outside-the-home-1326352

Irish society today is no different than Irish society in the 70’s. If you want to see the modern equivalent of 70’s criticism of people who are literally just trying to survive, this threads a good example -

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058249538/dole-summer-bonus-are-they-for-real/p1

What is been discussed is called peak production, after all the easy resources have been extracted it becomes ever more expensive to extract the next batch of resources - to the point where it is no longer cost effective to do so. Peak oil is the poster child of the concept because oil is so central to everything we do. Literally everything we see is an expression of the historically cheap and plentiful supply of oil - and once that peak is passed (as it has already passed for oil) everything becomes more expensive. This all should have played out a decade ago in the case of oil, but Saudi Arabia decided to try to bankrupt the American fracking industry by ramping up production to the point where American oil was unviable. They did so but for some inexplicable reason the American fracking industry carried on producing without ever producing a dividend. Oil prices are just about where they should be given the constriction on global supply predicted by peak oil. Prices aint coming down and that applies to everything since everything is an indirect oil product.

However this is just the obvious stuff - the things we make with cheap energy. The less obvious stuff is the consumption of water and soil. Soil errosion and abandonment is the single greatest crisis that no one is aware of. Modern farming practices deplete soil fertility and structure every time a crop is grown. Once soil transitions into depleted dust - it is incredibly difficult to bring it back into production. Coupled to this is the fact that humanity has depleted biodiversity by 50% since the 1980's. Biodiversity is both the range and populations of species so a species doesn't have to go extinct for it to represent a loss of biodiversity. Biodiversity is the foundation of human life - we depend on it for our survival in many and unpredictable ways.

It is my personal belief that humanity is already extinct for all these reasons - the only thing to decide is how that event actually plays out in detail. It may take hundreds or thousand of years for the last human to choke on his own detritus - but there is an inevitability to it when we lost so much moving from 3billion humans in the 1970's to 7billion humans today - and all predictions pointing to a further growth of population to 10billion by 2050.

Many young people are painfully aware of these trends and how they will play out in their lifetimes - and are actively deciding to not have children to spare them an inevitable degree of suffering in a degraded world.

Well the people from the developing countries are migrating to developed countries. So it dosnt make sense if the people from the developed countries are not having children for scare resouces because people are going to be migrating here anyway. And the way capitalism and globalism works is that it encourages this migration, so in one way or another the population in developed western nations is maintaned or keeps increasing. This is important because the people in developed nations use the most energy from cars, heating etc.

I dont know if its the end of humanity as you say, when we are planning to populate planets like Mars within the next century or so. Food is also been grown in labs, and the technolgy for renewable energy is not there yet but should be over time.

The worrying trend I see is that intelligent people are not having children and are often taxed crazy amounts so that people earning less can have an easier life. If you want society to evolve and innovate, the good genes need to be passed along.

I bet good old Enda Kenny will regret jumping on the pro-EU bandwagon of austerity and neo-liberalism! It is a national scandal how that Apple Tax is still being appealed when it could be used to promote pro-family procreation policies. Hopefully, the next election will bring about the clear-out needed in our political class.

France did just that. Encouraging bigger families for working people:

https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2005/sep/22/france.jonhenley1

There was also discussion about encouraging highly educated successful women having kids, and then being an example to those kids.

But as next person mentions, can we build houses and accompanying infrastructure to match our population growth? And where should we build it?

A lot of professional working people in their 20's, 30's and 40's are living with their parents and these should be prioritized.

No point in building more houses if the immigration surge continues at the current pace. I know it's going to be politically incorrect saying this, but non-EU immigration needs to be halted. For example, I would scrap the 'Critical Skills Employment Permits' that Varadkar introduced in 2019/20. If Multinational corporations want to locate here, they should be required to hire Irish/EU staff and if they can't find the 'skill', they should be required to train local people because after-all most Multinational corporations pay very little corporation tax here compared to other EU Countries. It doesn't seem like much to ask because at the end of the day, a Government cannot be held to ransom by a big corporation.

I'm not against house building either but the eco-monster high-rises in the old City districts are a disaster. The old quarters of Cities are historic areas.