THE National Economic and Social Council recently pointed out the challenges Ireland is going to face due to a steep decline in the birth rate.
This has consequences for pensions, public services, and the very nature of Irish society.
The report suggested that by the 2050s Ireland’s population looks likely to contract. As a wise Kerry woman observed to me during the Celtic Tiger boom years, the houses are getting bigger and bigger but the families living in them are getting smaller and smaller. How strange we are.
One thing I remember about growing up was just how many of us there were. As simple as that sounds, growing up Irish in England was characterised by numbers. We weren’t a stray Irish family living amongst a sea of English people. It was the other way around.
I grew up in a vast Irish community to the point that it seemed like everyone was Irish. Everyone at school came from an Irish family, with a few random exceptions.
Football fans nowadays sing that song, The City is Ours, which I actually think might first have emerged as an anti-Irish song sung by Glasgow Rangers fans, but that is often how it felt.
We were everywhere and the city was ours. England’s second city and a city of over a million people but as a young man if I ventured out of our usual haunts I’d still come across us.
I remember one time going to a pub on the other side of the city that I’d never really go to and my mother asking me a few days later what I’d been doing in that place because someone had seen me there and told someone else who mentioned it to my mother.
We lived in a big city and a small village at the same time. They say Ireland is an intimate society, that you can make a connection in just a short conversation and find someone you both know.
My daughter had left Cork to study in Galway and in conversation with a new friend from County Laois worked out that this girl had gone to her debs with my first cousin’s son. Small country.
We had that too but in a different setting. We’d wander around the streets of a big, post-industrial city and the connections were there.
My favourite is still overhearing my sister tell my father about someone and on his claiming he didn’t know them she said you do, her mother is from Mayo and her dad had a stroke.
And there were a lot of us. We were at one stage the largest immigrant grouping in a city of immigrants. There were weekends in parts of the city where it only seemed to be us. Being Irish and being from that city were indivisible.
It was simply who we were. And we, the children of the 1950s immigrants, we didn’t come from a declining birth rate.
I’m one of six. Families were large. That friend you had always had a load of brothers or a pile of sisters. Being one of six wasn’t to come from a particularly big family.
It was fairly standard. Standard too was that we lived in a three bedroomed council house though the bedroom I shared with my brother was so small it is unlikely it would qualify as a bedroom now. Bigger families and smaller houses. I can vouch for that alright.
Apart from the structural changes population decline will create in Irish society it will surely create cultural change too.
What will the future Irish be like when they’re all from small families? Will they be different? What will the collective be like when it’s populated by people who are used to being put first?
Not that there is anything negative about being, say, an only child but if nearly everyone is? Will that be a different Ireland? My mother was one of thirteen. My father one of five.
I was chatting with a lovely woman once and she asked was I from a big family and I said, well you know, I’m one of six. How about you I asked? I’m one of twenty-two, she said.
I don’t think we’ll be seeing those days again.
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