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Ireland is not full. South Korea’s population is 10 times higher on a similar land area

Farcical claims of Ireland being full show little awareness of our grim history of depopulation

Journalist John Healy who chronicled the rural depopulation of Ireland in his Irish Times series Death of an Irish Town. Photograph: Eddie Kelly
Ronan McGreevy's picture
Ronan McGreevy
Fri Aug 02 2024 - 06:00

Journalist John Healy’s “Death of an Irish Town” was one of the most important series of articles ever published in this newspaper.

Healy’s brutal dissection of his hometown of Charlestown, Co Mayo would not have surprised anybody living in rural Ireland in 1967, but the exasperation and anger with which it was expressed cut through much of the empty rhetoric around emigration and its effects on the west of Ireland.

Charlestown had grown rich on emigrants’ remittances in the 1930s and 1940s, he argued. Everybody assumed the town’s lost sons and daughters would return some day, but they never did and another generation followed after them. Of the 23 who were in his 1944 primary school class, just three were left in Charlestown, seven were elsewhere in Ireland and 13 had emigrated.

“People are wealth,” Healy wrote. The west of Ireland needed “people who will re-inhabit houses and build new ones, revive consolidated holdings and build new ones, people who will be truly educated and who will stay and give local leadership and the inspiration it can produce to a people denuded of that quality in the brain drain to the east of Ireland and Britain and America.”

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The depopulation of Ireland has been well documented. Every history student learns that the population of the island went from 8.2 million in 1841 before the Great Famine to 6.5 million in 1851 and kept falling. In the Republic the population fell in every decade post-independence until the 1970s. It is a demographic collapse without precedent in the modern world.

Not so well known or analysed is the repopulation of the Republic which has gone on over the last 50 years. It took 30 years for the population of the State to go from three million to four million, 20 years to go from four million to five million and, at current projections, a decade to get to six million sometime in the mid-2030s by which time the island of Ireland will have surpassed its pre-famine population.

This is a good news story which is not celebrated enough. It is very difficult to recreate the sense of hopelessness and despair which surrounded the narrative on emigration for so much of the State’s existence best exemplified by Gay Byrne’s famous remark in the 1980s that we should hand Ireland back to the Queen with an apology.

The repopulation of the Republic which began in the 1970s was an east coast phenomenon until the days of the Celtic Tiger. My home county of Leitrim recorded a drop in population in every census from the famine until 1996 when it fell to 25,000. My late father recalls in the 1950s that it was standing room only on the trains and boats going to England. Fortunately, he came back, but for us, growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, leaving was as natural as breathing. It was hardwired into us that there was no future for us in our own county.

Since the nadir of 1996, the population of Leitrim has increased by 40 per cent to 35,000. There is a vibrancy in the county that was impossible to imagine a generation ago. Carrick-on-Shannon has the highest fertility rate in the State – an optimistic punt on the future.

Ireland is not full no matter how often the far-right claims that it is. We are one of the most underpopulated countries in Europe. South Korea sustains a population 10 times that of the State on roughly the land area.

The hostility that is directed at asylum seekers obscures the fact that they represent only a section of immigration to Ireland. Between April 2022 and April 2023, the last year for which figures are available, 141,600 immigrants arrived into the State including 29,100 returning Irish nationals.

It was an exceptional year with a large influx of Ukrainian refugees, but the trend is unmistakable. So long as the State remains prosperous and peaceful and there are opportunities available, immigrants will seek their fortune in Ireland and they will be here legally and because we need them.

Depopulation was the greatest problem faced by successive Irish governments. Repopulation is a challenge. Planning for the State’s rising population will be the biggest issue facing this and future Irish governments.

Belatedly the present Government has woken up to the realisation that the current housing target of 33,000 units a years is nowhere near sufficient to account for the rising population. New targets will be published in the autumn.

If managed right the State will, in the coming decades, be a thriving, multicultural, integrated society with sufficient housing stock for all, an expanded transport network to cope with the extra population and public services that match the needs of those who need them.

If managed badly, it will be a place of perpetual resentment with housing shortages the dominant narrative and overstretched public services.

The doom loop of population loss has been replaced by the virtuous circle of population increase.

The challenges of prosperity we face are far preferable to the problems of poverty faced by Irish governments for most of the 20th century.