It is 70 years since Kerry writer Bryan MacMahon found himself the target of considerable hostility in his own locality. His sin was to contribute to a controversial 1954 book, The Vanishing Irish, edited by a Notre Dame University cleric, John A O’Brien.
The book comprised a series of essays on Ireland’s population and demographic crisis and was published in a year when more than 40,000 emigrated from Ireland. The title was deliberately provocative and the core message alarming: Ireland was, claimed O’Brien, “teetering perilously on the verge of extinction” due to the Irish reluctance to marry.
O’Brien had asked the essayists to “give it straight from the shoulder” and MacMahon obliged by recounting stories of clerical control and denunciation of “company keeping”. It was a particularly brave thing for MacMahon to do given his position as a national schoolteacher whose management was clerical. The essays were subsequently serialised in a Sunday newspaper.
MacMahon recalled: “I became the subject of much misunderstanding. How dare a national teacher, whose employer was the Parish Priest, utter such sentiments? I woke up one morning to find that I had been mentioned from at least three pulpits in the locality.”
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Corresponding with a friend in San Francisco, MacMahon was unrepentant: “The problem here in Ireland, you can take it from me, is pretty desperate and everybody seems to give it the good old ‘hush-hush.’ All of my spare time is spent rambling here and there throughout Ireland and the whole countryside is crawling with ancient spinsters and bachelors. Marriage and birth rates for the past quarter indicate a further decline.”
Things improved in the 1960s and that had profound psychological consequences considering just how exceptional Ireland had been in its 19th and 20th century experiences. Demographers highlight that in the 21-year period 1850 to 1870, emigration from Ireland was more than two and a half million people, with a further 1.4 million emigrating from 1870 to 1890, far greater than any natural increase in the population, while the population of what became the Republic of Ireland fell in 45 of the years between 1901 and 1961.
There were further periods of emigration, especially in the 1980s (71,000 emigrated in 1989), but from the mid-1990s Ireland came to host a larger proportion of immigrants than many other western European states; by 2011, 17 per cent of the population had been born abroad.
In 1995, a Dáil debate on Irish asylum policy witnessed overwhelming support for a compassionate approach, and TDs drew from the well of Irish emigration history; Fianna Fáil TD John O’Donoghue suggested the status of refugees “should strike a chord with every man, woman and child here who has any grasp of Irish history”. Such positivism has long been under strain.
There are ironies running through the characterisation of our demographic history. More than a century ago, committed Irish nationalists saw recovery of the Irish population as a vindication of national robustness; I have highlighted before that Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Féin, maintained that an Ireland freed from Britain would be self-sufficient and economically strong enough to not just recover its pre-famine population of more than eight million, but sustain much more than that.
Today, extreme Irish “nationalists” see such a populous Ireland as a grave threat to national purity. Their slogans “Ireland is Full” or “Stop the new plantation of Ireland” are comically historically illiterate, but it is no laughing matter given the dangerous hands holding such placards.
The virulent racism will only worsen if an updated version of “hush-hush” is adopted. This week, research from the CSO contained in the report Population and Labour Force Projections 2023-2057, compiled with the assistance of more than 40 individuals comprising an expert group on population projections, suggested that, taking a high net migration projection, the Republic’s population could reach 7.01 million by 2057.
Under a more moderate projection, the figure given is 6.45 million or, under a low projection, 5.73 million. If either of the first two scenarios transpires, adding the population of Northern Ireland, the overall island population could reach or surpass its pre-famine peak.
Such projections do not exist for academic reasons; the role of the CSO is to “support evidence-informed decision making.” Of the factors determining population change (births, deaths and migration) the report notes “the most influential, volatile and uncertain from an Irish perspective is migration.”
Given the precarities arising from climate change, political convulsions and conflict, and the Irish labour market, future migration to Ireland is likely to be high, and planning for a more populous country requires a vision that takes account of both pressures and opportunities, and extends well beyond electoral cycles.
Given the determination of defenders of our national soul and their vile tactics in identifying migrants as the problem, such political and community leadership is vital.