We need a national conversation to plan for the country’s future

I WAS undergoing a series of medical tests recently.

No big deal, although it involved endless amounts of blood disappearing into little tubes, and at one point a blood pressure cuff being attached to my arm for 24 hours.

I passed, you’ll be delighted to know (I hope). And when it was all over, I asked the doctor did all this mean I’d live to be 100? “Listen,” he said, “the medical test hasn’t been invented that can tell you that. If you want to live to a decent old age, the most important thing to do is to be very careful in your choice of parents.”

Now, as the CSO would say, “there is general consensus internationally among demographers that improvements in life expectancy will continue for the foreseeable future. The main question to be addressed therefore is the rate of improvement.” Men and women born today will have a much longer life expectancy than I will, but if I make my most favourable assumption (if I base it on my longest-lived parent) I have a good few years to go.

There’s no guarantee, of course, that I’ll be around in 2046, and even less of a guarantee about what condition I’ll be in. But if I am around, I could be living in a country with a population not far short of 7m.

That’s the CSO’s projection, based on several assumptions about birth rates and migration working out as positively as possible. The exact figure it comes up with, on the most favourable assumptions, is 6,729,000.

There was a census the year after I was born — 1951. The population that year was 2,898,264. So in my lifetime (giving myself a decent set of odds) the population will have more than doubled.

In fact it will be 2.3 times what it was the year I was born. That’s an astonishing journey — and an astonishing achievement, when you think about it.

You can see the document in which all this information is contained, Population and Labour Force Projections 2016-2046, at the CSO’s website. If you turn to page 6, you’ll see an amazing graph which plots the population of Ireland since the Famine and just before. In 1841 we had a population of just over 6.5m, and it declined steadily, in census after census, until 1960.

Then our population started to rise again, and it will pass that pre-Famine figure at some time in the next 30 years. It could be said that it has taken our population nearly 200 years to recover from the Famine. But of course that’s not the whole story. Throughout the last century, for instance, more people were born than died each year for the first 60 or so. Despite that natural growth, our population kept going down. That was because Ireland, for all that time, was a good country to leave. And many, if not most, who left never came back. We’re at another moment in our history right now where many are feeling it’s right to leave. They’re less likely to stay away this time, less likely to carry bad memories with them of a repressive, frightening place. Nowadays, the choice is between poor economic outcomes and better prospects abroad.

Whatever the causes, the bottom line is that by the middle of this century, we’ll be a significantly bigger country than at any time in our lifetimes. I suppose the big question is — what will we do with it? The demographers and the statisticians in the CSO can have a stab at some of the answers.

We’ll be living longer, for instance. Men born now have an average life expectancy of 77.9, and it’s 82.5 for women. Men born in 2046 will live until they’re 85.1, and women until they’re 88.5. On the other hand, our younger population could also grow dramatically — giving us one third more children up to the age of 14[/url] in the next 30 years.

But there’s only so much the statistics can tell us. They don’t answer the questions about what kind of country we’ll be then. Yes, we’ll need to look after more younger people and more older people. But a bigger country can sustain more. It’s likely to be more capable of sustaining and generating economic growth. It’s likely to be more urban. It will need more schools at every level, and there’ll be room for more culture of all kinds. It could be a sporting giant. That substantial population of the near future will face huge environmental challenges.

In other words, the kind of rapid population growth we’re looking at is both daunting and immensely exciting. If we plan for it. If we wait for it to happen, especially knowing what we know now about the trends, we will have only ourselves to blame if the results are chaotic and miserable.

How do you plan for something like that? It’s the job of government, of course, but in the short term our governments are likely to be preoccupied with immediate concerns. The plan we develop needs to involve all of us in a heightened sense of awareness of the issues we need to deal with and the opportunities that are emerging. In short, and please forgive the cliché, we need an inclusive national conversation about the future. If I were the Government, I’d ask someone above politics to lead that conversation. The President seems to me to be the ideal person, and the presidency the ideal place.

I would ask the president to establish a commission to look at the emerging population trends, and to conduct a series of seminars over the next few years, with a view to publishing, at the end of that time, a report on the future. It may require a simple piece of legislation to set it up and to give it independent status, but that’s not difficult.

YOU’D need a range of people to serve on a commission like that — a mix of experts and people who have thought long and hard about the challenges they are facing in their own bit of society. Business people, farmers, people at work, educators, historians — they would be asked to serve on a pro bono basis and to bring whatever resources they could from their own organisations. It might need a small team who could commission particular pieces of expertise — geographers, sociologists, economists, pension and public policy experts.

People, and especially countries, tend not to plan for the future. Certainly we never have. But neither have we ever had a basic set of data about the future that will almost certainly emerge. And while the CSO report is based on a variety of different assumptions, with different outcomes based on the set of assumptions you pick, it’s quite clear that our future will be different.

And exciting. We have a real oppor-tunity now to begin thinking about a future that we can build ourselves, and a country that will be a substantial entity in its own right. Much less dependent on outside forces, much more capable of generating domestic growth. We mustn’t allow it all to happen by accident.