Why are we afraid of the one thing that’s vital to our economic success?

FOR a while last Sunday it felt as if the entire population of Ireland was in Croke Park. I had hunted for a month for tickets, and just when it seemed the mission would fail a decent man from Kerry (he’s owed a big one) came up trumps.

I was willing to put up with all the friendly advice about how to find my way to Croke Park and how to ask for a pint of Guinness as gaeilge. But what really wasn’t bearable was that last-minute French try that stole what might have been an improbable victory.

We trooped home in silence, but I reflected afterwards that the singing at the start had really resounded around the stadium. I don’t think Amhrán na bhFiann and Ireland’s Call have ever been sung with more gusto or in greater unison.

Croke Park might have done the occasion and the rugby proud, but I like to think the enormous crowd that turned out to cheer Ireland on, even if they went home disappointed, did the great stadium proud, too.

Packed into the DART like sardines, trudging up the North Circular Road in our tens of thousands and filling every seat and standing space in the stadium (not to mention squeezing 10-deep at the bar at half-time), it really did seem as if the whole of Ireland had turned out.

We wouldn’t have fitted, of course. Not all 4,234,925 of us. It’s an amazing figure that, isn’t it? Especially when you think back on the history we were all taught in school. The Great Famine decimated the population of Ireland, which stood at more than eight million before the potato blight hit. In the two decades around the famine, from 1841-1861, the population of Ireland almost halved, and in 1861 a census recorded our population at 4.4 million. That’s the highest figure recorded in 145 years, until now.

Most of the censuses taken between the Great Famine and now have recorded a decline in our population. In the last century, the main reason for that was the number of people leaving the country. Year after year throughout the 20th century, the number of people born in Ireland easily exceeded the number who died, usually by a factor of two or more.

But in many of those years, when you added the number who left the country to the number who died, the total frequently exceeded the number who were born. And we saw it as a disaster. From 1926 to 1971, in less than half a century, over a million people left. Then there was a sudden change.

For the eight years after a period of rapid economic growth, through the late 1960s and early ‘70s, an average of about 14,000 people a year came home and the population grew slightly. But it couldn’t last. After the oil shocks of the early 1970s, and for a lot of the next two decades, emigration became the norm again. That last wave of people leaving Ireland was different. For most of our history, it was people without education, people who earned a hard living by the sweat of their brow.

In the 1980s and early ‘90s, it was graduates. There was a time when Silicone Valley had more Irish graduates than any other nationality. Their gain was our loss because that was our first real brain drain.

But every Irish family, right through our formative years as a country, was scarred by emigration. Emigration represented a million or more individual tales of hardship and sacrifice and often, though not always, failure.

And they were the ones who left. Families who were left behind were usually the poorer for the loss of the emigrant. In my family I had brothers with whom I was unable to form a relationship until they were adults because they had left when I was still very young. And most Irish families could tell similar stories.

Perhaps the hardest hit were those where the breadwinner went abroad to work in the building industry in Britain and later in construction in the US. Remittances came home, to be sure, but in how many families did those remittances dry up?

How many lonely men started second families in Boston or Coventry and gradually severed their links with their loved ones at home? How many fell into drink through loneliness, and little by little stopped being any help to the wives and children left behind?

AND those individual stories had another dimension. Those ‘good old days’ of emigration and declining population were also a time of economic stagnation and misery. It was a vicious circle — the harder the economic times became, the more people left. The more people left, the less likely it was that our economy could grow and thrive.

Later on, in the 1970s and ‘80s, as we invested more and more in educating people for jobs and careers abroad, we seemed to be condemning ourselves to deeper and deeper economic debt at home.

That declining population, whatever its causes, was a sign of a country in trouble. A country that couldn’t afford to rear its own children, let alone look after its sick and elderly. And that trouble, that sense of not really being capable, lasted for an awful lot of our first century of independence.

Now, when you look at the population statistics, what do they tell you? Our population is growing rapidly, as we all know. On average per year over the last few years, 61,000 of us are being born, 28,000 of us are dying and 46,000 people are coming into the country. So the population is growing by almost 80,000 a year.

Of the 46,000 coming into the country, half are Irish people coming home. But there are now probably (we’ll know the exact figure later this year) around 400,000 non-Irish people living here. That’s around one in every 11of the population.

The history of our country since its foundation has been determined by that population story.

And it proves one thing beyond any doubt: immigration is good for us. The Central Statistics Office, in its preliminary report on the 2006 census, goes back 80 years to show how our population has ebbed and flowed.

If you were to put the chart of economic growth and development side by side with the population figures, it would be clear as day. When our population is rising, our economy is growing. When population is declining, our economy is stagnant.

Apart from that one simple correlation, we know from our history, and from more immediate personal experience, how much our culture and psychology has been shaped by population trends.

Throughout all the years when our population was in decline, nobody ever described Ireland as an exciting place to grow up. It is surely that now, a modern, colourful and cosmopolitan country.

Population growth, fuelled by immigration, has given us palpable and visible benefits and has contributed enormously to the confidence that every visitor notices immediately.

So why, since immigration has served us so well, are we so afraid of it?