In 1954 a book called The Vanishing Irish was published in London. On the cover is the question: "Are the Irish going to vanish from this earth?" On the title page the epigraph is taken from the bishop of Cork, Dr Cornelius Lucey: "The rural population is vanishing and with it is vanishing the Irish race itself."

In his dramatic opening paragraph, the editor, Father John A. O'Brien, writes of the "fading away of the once great and populous nation of Ireland" and warns that "the Irish will virtually disappear as a nation and will be found only as an enervated remnant in a land occupied by foreigners".

Accompanying these dire words is a cartoon of the amazing shrinking man that represents the population of the 26 counties. In 1840, with the population at 6.5 million, he is a plump, happy-looking giant. By 1946 he is a tiny, miserable Tom Thumb. By 2040 a Lilliputian speck. The message is stark: within the foreseeable future, there will be no Irish left in Ireland.

The astonishing thing is that O'Brien's prophecies of doom were not entirely laughable. Projecting current trends into the far future is always a mug's game, and statisticians could point out that the rate of population decline had slowed considerably since Independence.

Nevertheless, the population was still falling significantly. By 1961, it would be just 2.8 million. The Irish marriage rate was the lowest in the world. Emigration was at crisis levels: a third of Irish people under 30 in 1946 had left the country by 1971.

This week it can be said with some confidence that the Irish are not vanishing. The Central Statistics Office published its latest population estimates on Wednesday. There were 52,000 more of us in April 2001 than a year previously, with the rise split evenly between a surplus of births over deaths and of immigrants over emigrants. The bigger picture was even more dramatic: the population, at 3.84 million, is now at its highest since the 1881 census.

This rise is significant in itself, especially when it is remembered that just a decade ago the population was actually falling. In 1991 the national gloom at a time of economic slump and renewed mass emigration was deepened when CSO figures showed that the upward trend apparent since the mid-1960s had been reversed.

If that was rightly seen as a mark of national failure, then the addition of nearly a quarter of a million people since 1996 is a proper source of pride.

More important than the figures themselves, however, are their effects on the national self-image. From the raw data it is possible to leap to two epic conclusions. One is that the long, deep repercussions of the Great Famine of the 1840s have finally faded. The other is that, as Gerry O'Hanlon, a director of the CSO, put it on Wednesday, "We are no longer an emigrant country". Each of these conclusions is broadly accurate. Each also needs to be qualified.

This is not quite the End of History. The experience of depopulation which has marked communities in rural Ireland has not entirely faded. Although the CSO does not yet have a regional breakdown, the evidence is that growth is heavily concentrated in cities and towns and on the eastern seaboard.

Long-term forecasts suggest that 80 per cent of the population increase up to 2031 will be in the east. Rural communities therefore may well continue to decline.

Meanwhile, the notion that we are no longer an emigrant country does not mean that the population has suddenly become fixed and stable. The Republic of Elsewhere to which so many Irish people have belonged for so long still has a hold on our allegiances.

There are still huge Irish-born populations in the UK and the US. Emigration has not stopped: this week's figures show that almost 20,000 people emigrated in the last year, a big drop on the 70,000 who left in the crisis year of 1988-1989, but a substantial number nevertheless.

And, with 46,000 immigrants having arrived in the last year, migration continues to have a bigger impact on Irish population trends than the natural tides of birth and death.

Behind that last statistic, too, there lies a tale. For all the talk of the country being flooded with immigrants, it is well to remember that the annual surplus of immigrants over emigrants is still only 26,000.

A large majority of these immigrants, moreover, is made up of people coming from the UK, the rest of the EU and the US. Most of these are actually Irish people returning from abroad. Yet concern about immigration centres on the minority of immigrants who come from central Europe or from Africa. The only reason why that should be so is racism.

The disquiet that occupies the gap between reality and image suggests that the achievement of demographic normality does not in itself mark an end to anxieties about who "we" are.

For now at least the era in which the Irish population was an exception to the rule that prevailed almost everywhere else seems to be over. Hopefully, the era in which the strands that now make up that rising population are woven into an inclusive community is about to begin.

fotoole@irish-times.ie