Ireland's fertility time bomb: Falling population 'a dangerous territory' for society and the economy
Ireland’s average age for a woman to give birth is now the highest it has been in recorded history, at 33.3 years in 2021.
Ireland has a fertility problem. It is not a new observation. The age at which people are having children for the first time in this country has been on the march upwards for decades.
There are lots of reasons for that. Women are often choosing to build a career before contemplating having children. Sexual mores have changed over the past 30 years. More than anything, people are probably choosing to have babies later in life because they can afford to do so.
Other people, more and more of them, are simply electing to not have children at all. Some people are making that decision because of how they see the world going, in terms of climate change, the cost of living, war, you name it.
Societal changes, such as the housing crisis, mean more people are living in shared accommodation for longer spells, often resulting in them not choosing to have children in such a space.
Meanwhile, the flip side of people choosing to have children later in life has two consequences: they will invariably have fewer of them than they might have in times past, and they may struggle to have them at all, given a woman's fertility typically declines rapidly after the age of 35.
There is also the fact that in a country now fully-attuned to two-parent working households, a large family of the historic Irish Catholic variety is a more daunting prospect.
But regardless of the varying reasons, the fact remains that Ireland’s average age for a woman to give birth is now the highest it has been in recorded history, at 33.3 years in 2021.
What one might forget is that Ireland is not the only country which has changed at a rate of knots over the past few decades.
The drop in fertility — Ireland's total fertility rate (TFR), or the number of children born to every person who can give birth, is a little over half what it was in 1950 — seen here is replicated across much of the Western world, albeit it has fallen at a much slower rate in Ireland.
Which is what brings us to the fertility problem the world is facing, one in which the trends to some extent are “inevitable”, in the words of Dr Austin Schumacher, assistant professor at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and co-author of a new study on the matter.
The ‘problem’ we’re talking about is probably better described as a conundrum.
What the study, entitled Global Fertility in 204 Countries and Territories 1950-2021, and published last week, shows is that TFR, the metric for sustaining a country’s population levels, is shrinking to such an extent that by the end of this century, almost every one of the world’s countries will see their population levels dropping.
In practical terms, that means Western countries will not have enough people to maintain their economies.
The problem is skewed, with some countries in a far more extreme position than others. South Korea is probably the developed nation most associated with falling fertility rates. A perennially overcrowded, though wealthy country, the extent to which prior governmental policy focused on ‘less babies, higher education’ has seen the TFR there drop from a massive 5.72 in 1950 to the lowest-in-the-world level of 0.82 currently seen.
To put that in context, the Schumacher study shows all countries’ population levels dropping by the year 2100. South Korea is already at the level it will be at by then.
The problem has not been lost on the South Korean authorities, who are scrambling to try and find a way to make having babies an attractive prospect for their female population. It is probably too late however. A newly empowered generation has seen how expensive and difficult having children in their society is, and have collectively said ‘no thanks’.
Other countries, predominantly in less wealthy regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, are still reproducing at a rate multiple times that required to sustain population growth.
How big an issue is this? It’s big.
“These future trends in fertility rates and live births will completely reconfigure the global economy and the international balance of power and will necessitate re-organising societies,” says Dr Natalia Bhattacharjee, co-lead author with Dr Schumacher of the study, adding the situation will eventually culminate in a world where “there is fierce competition for migrants to sustain economic growth”.
It’s a comparable, if longer and larger-scale, version of Ireland’s current pension headache — where so many people are set to reach pensionable age at the same time in about 15 years that it is unclear how the economy can both fund the pensions and survive the loss of taxation resulting from so many workers leaving the workforce at the same time.
And much like the pension problem, the real problem to be solved is how to tackle a real-world issue politically.
In terms of pensions, the electorate was up in arms in Ireland before the February 2020 general election at the thought the government was set to raise the State pension age, with Sinn Féin pledging at the time that should the party come to power, it would keep the age as it was.
That was not a sustainable position — given Ireland’s age demographics, doing nothing was not going to be an effective solution. But it did serve to win votes.
The fertility issue facing the world is the same, given, as Dr Shumacher notes, there are only three solutions: raise fertility, reduce mortality, and increase migration. In order to raise fertility, measures like free childcare and enhanced parental leave have been shown to be effective ways of bolstering fertility, but not to the extent these statistics would require.
The third option, that of managed and increased migration, is by far the most practical.
But migration has become a dirty word politically across the globe. In the US, Donald Trump is set to run for president for a third time almost entirely on a policy of blaming the inflation crisis on migration.
Across Europe, anti-migrant sentiment has been heightened amid the chaos of war in the Middle East and Eastern Europe and the surge in migration which has resulted, with far-right groups across the spectrum likewise emboldened by what is happening.
In recent months, we have seen right-leaning and far-right groups perform well in numerous elections and it is expected to be a particularly prominent topic in the forthcoming European elections.
Ireland is no exception.
Dr Schumacher acknowledges national identity is “not my area of expertise”. He speaks only to the facts, and they are that something will need to be done to handle the issue of dropping fertility rates.
Some countries are alive to the risk, notably Germany, Japan, and some of the Scandinavian nations. It is not a matter much discussed in Irish discourse, however, at present.
To flip the issue around, I ask Dr Schumacher what a country that does nothing regarding these trends for the next 75 years would look like.
“I’d say that’s dangerous territory,” he says.
“One thing to keep in mind is that these changes aren’t necessarily happening very rapidly. So it’s hard to really appreciate these changes on a year-to-year basis. These are things that are happening on a long-term scale, but that also means that any solutions are also going to need to be implemented on a long-term scale as well.
“So if a country doesn’t take some measures to address this, their population would be at risk of falling.
But he does not see falling fertility as a problem pure and simple.
“There are a lot of opportunities with this change so long as it is dealt with in an open, ethical way,” he says. But dealt with it must be.
“The trends are inevitable in some sense. What we are seeing now is a good indicator of what will happen in the next 10 to 20 years. Any sort of change to these trajectories that we want to have, we're going to need to start now in order to have as big an impact as we can. It’s not impossible for that to happen,” he says.
But it seems the fertility issue itself, is irreversible.
“We’ve never seen any sort of large increases in fertility that would see countries back over population-replacement levels,” he says.
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