Immigration and Ireland - MEGATHREAD *Mod Note Added 02/09/25*

Hungary literally exempted women from income tax in an effort to increase the birth rate... It didn't work.

How is that Ireland in the 80's not much immigration , 12-15% unemployment mass emigration and there was not a pension time bomb ?

Are they not proud as punch banging on about housing targets building circa 30k “homes” (Read: Tiny flats in massive blocks like something out of Soviet Ukraine) a year?

How is that even making a dent in solving the housing crisis when 58k newcomers are arriving a year?

It’d… wait for it… make you think they don’t care one jot about solving the housing issue, a more conspiratorial mind would say they are happy with the current situation.

You cannot predict the future so its just an opinion . To house these people in the future will cost the state far more than now !!

In the 1980's 450,000 emigrated so the higher birth rate was lessened .

In 1980, the median age was 25.5 years, in 2025 it is 39.6 years.

@Goldengirl wrote: "If ..such a crash were to happen these [talking about mainly Indians] would be the first to leave , as they are highly skilled educated workers ."

This sounds a bit rubbish that they would be the first to leave. I wonder would you have any data to back that up?

Good post just shows how much society has changed. More expectations, higher living standards and living longer. But on the other side of things, know people who retired and got rid of the two cars for one. Sensible stuff if not commuting for work etc.

But you mention things like phone and back in the day as you say it was the landline now it’s mobile phone and associated bill plus bill for house internet, fibre or whatever. There are a lot more bills now that didn’t exist back then. For example no car nct back then, no internet bill ad I’ve said, no property tax, bins weren’t private companies or else council bond I think and cheaper than now.

Bottom line is a lot more bills now and if people going into pension age are still going to be paying rent it’s not very good at all. I don’t know what the solutions are but cost of living has to be reasonable. I think we have to be more of a society that cares rather than putting people in survival mode, that’s a downgrade of living standards and peace of mind for people.

Correction, it was initially for mothers of 4 children or more. They have now changed it to 2 or more. There's no indication it's increased the birth rate and it's been there since 2019.

In the western world we are living in today money and individual happiness is what matters to people the most. These two things form the basis of consumerism whereby people get more joy from owning and consuming things than from creating and building things that last beyond their time. High stress (social media is always there to show someone who is more wealthy and more happy), falling standards of leaving and lowering birth rates are some of the signs of declining society. 

Immigration, while it offsets the population decline, boosts the workforce and can help the governments with pressures on pensions and health care, reduces cohesion of the society and may cause housing crisis (see Canada for example).

Lowering birth rates are dependent on multiple interacting factors ranging from economic & cost, through social, cultural and behavioural to policy, institutional and social support issues, and there is no easy solution. I believe that the birth rates issues cannot be solved in isolation without addressing other factors that contribute to a societal decline in the western world.

We would have to look at reasons why the western society is in decline. There is a number of reasons why it may be happening, one being that this is civilisational life cycle. As the civilisation matures it increases the ‘abstraction factor’ and becomes more and more removed from its roots. Instead of having lots of babies, working hard and building great things for generations to come, people become more individualistic and concerned about their own personal benefits (cult of self), they ‘invest’ in making money and often speculate (i.e. bitcoin) as well as engage in rent seeking behaviour (extracting wealth from others) rather than actually work, build companies, hire people etc. Capitalism from focusing on society-wide wealth generation becomes dysfunctional and over time becomes focused on generating money only for the wealthy elites (financialisation of capitalism).

Money becomes one common factor that is used to evaluate one’s position in the society and every one uses it to compare themselves with others. People only pretend to work and the Immigrants come in to do the actual work. For thousands of years people lived knowing that they can only be truly happy as a part of a group, community and society. The biggest penalty back then was for one to be expelled from their community. Today the biggest fear that people have is have no money and that is the sign how abstract the western world has become. Societies become unable to work in unity and collectively as fragmentation of social cohesion and identity occurs. The elites exploit the middle class, the middle class exploits the workers. Wealth gap widens and may eventually lead to social unrest and conflicts. At this late stage of the demise we can see decline in democracy and freedom. At that point society collapses.

Of course this model is very simplistic and imprecise. We can argue if all this is natural or intentional all week. 

If this is natural, then nothing can be done and that lowering birth rates cannot be fixed.

However, regardless of why it happens, immigration is not a contributing factor, it is rather something that the governments falsely see as a solution as they are incapable of analysing and solving problems caused by very complex systems such as a society.
They are simply trying to cure symptoms and not the cause.

The solution is to stop the demise and make the western civilisation rise again.

Was it the garda head brass or our politicians that told us last year there was no connection between immigration and crime. Court translation costs have risen to 10 times what it was a decade ago, imagine what it would have risen by if there was a link!

I read somewhere a while ago that in Denmark 64% of refugees (these were Palestinians I believe) that came to the country in around 1992 had criminal records by 2019. What is worse, around 23% of their kids also had criminal records.
Of course, this was a very specific and small (<400) group of people, so not a very representative sample. However, it shows what can happen when the immigrants who, for various reasons (i.e. culture, values, religion etc.), don't assimilate with the society. Not sure if larger studies of this issue had been undertaken.

Houses and concrete and people and traffic everywhere, huzzah.

GDP innit.

the people with mortgages who work hard and get nothing for their taxes vote for the ‘system’ time and time again and will continue to do so, do they not get what they deserve?