In the slightly more than 50 years since Ireland joined the EEC in 1973, the marriage rate per 1,000 population has halved. Births have fallen from almost 69,000 in 1973 to 54,000 in 2024.
A small number of births were outside marriage in 1973, but now 40 per cent of births are outside marriage or civil partnerships. The fertility rate, which was 3.7 in 1973, fell below replacement level to 1.5 in 2024. About 25 per cent of births are to non-Irish born mothers.
In the 1950s a Notre Dame academic, Fr John O’Brien, edited a book entitled The Vanishing Irish. Among other issues, O’Brien looked at the reluctance of Irish men to marry.
Then came the swinging sixties and marriages began to increase. In the 1970s, marriages averaged 21,562 each year before beginning to taper off.
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By 2024, the number of marriages in a rapidly growing population was 20,348, including 668 same-sex marriages. The question might be asked whether women are now reluctant to marry.
The move away from marriage as the traditional framework for giving birth and rearing a child is remarkable. The days of the breadwinner husband, emphasised by former taoiseach Seán Lemass when he insisted that children’s allowances should be paid to the father, are long gone.
In the days when many husbands could pay the mortgage and pay for the groceries, women possibly had more choice to care for children or be in the workforce, or a mixture of both. Now, however, two incomes are required for the mortgage and many household expenses.
If a rule were introduced that only one income could be used for a mortgage, would house prices collapse?
Despite the fall in births, the population has grown from 3.1 million in 1973 to 5.5 million in 2025. According to the 2022 census more than one million people resident in Ireland were born outside Ireland, about 20 per cent of the population. At the census of 1971, 2.5 per cent of the population were born outside Ireland.
The proportion of those usually resident who were born outside Northern Ireland has also increased to more than 13 per cent in the 2021 census while in England and Wales the proportion was close to 17 per cent.
Rather than vanishing, Ireland is changing. As well as immigration, an important factor in the growth in population is the increase in life expectancy. In 1973, the average life expectancy at birth for men and women was just over 71 years; today it is over 83 years.
Over those years Ireland moved from a lower-than-average life expectancy compared with other European member states to one of the highest levels of life expectancy.
At present there is talk of a pensions time-bomb due to the rapid growth of retirees in relation to the workforce.
A decade after The Vanishing Irish appeared, The Population Time Bomb was published. Written by American academic Paul Ehrlich, it claimed rapid population growth would lead to mass starvation and social collapse by the 1970s and 1980s. It advocated population control.
Following the McGee case in 1973 the use and sale of contraceptives gradually took hold in Ireland while abortion became legal following a constitutional referendum in 2018.
In 1973 when abortion was illegal in Ireland, 1,200 women travelled to the UK for abortions. In 2024, almost 11,000 abortions took place in Ireland.
One country which might have followed Ehrlich’s red flag was China, which pursued a one-child policy and is now trying hard to increase its population. Ehrlich’s forecast was wrong.
One way of dealing with the pensions time-bomb would be to develop schemes – some are already in place – whereby those in the workforce could build up their own pensions rather than depending entirely on a future generation of workers.
Given worries about the birth rate, mothers who are full-time carers for small children might be given credits, on a means-tested basis, towards a future pension. This might save large sums on the provision of childcare outside the home too.
There is a degree of mystery about demographic change in Ireland where there is a combination of falling birth rate, increased abortion and increased fertility treatments. The decline in the influence of religion on behaviour is probably of some relevance.
Will these trends continue or, like certain trends in the past, will they change? It is difficult to forecast.
Dr Finola Kennedy is an economist and author of Cottage to Creche: Family Change in Ireland (2001), Frank Duff: A Life Story (2011) and Local Matters: Parish, Local Government and Community in Ireland (2022)
