AS I SEE IT
BY MARIANNE HERON
It’s hardly a crash, which sounds terminal, more like a seesaw where the end that was up is now down. The end that is down is Ireland’s birth rate, the up side of the equation is our rapidly ageing population. The phenomenon has been titled Ireland’s Population Crash and was the focus of a two-part show on RTÉ television which began last week.
The brainchild of Eadaoin Stokes and Bill Malone of Cable Rock independent production company and directed by Alan Bailey, the programme sets out to alert us to a scenario where in future there will be far too few young people to shoulder the burden of minding too many old people. It’s a demographic picture which has altered rapidly in the space of two generations.
Not much you can do about the over-65s (or maybe there is) now the fastest-growing sector of the population who are quietly getting on with the business of growing older, living longer, healthier lives. In another two decades the elderly will be one in every four of the population and are the focus of begrudgery over the cost of their pensions, health and care which will gobble up as much as 8% of national income by 2050.
But what about the other end of the seesaw: what can be done about that? Go back to pre-contraception and pre-equality legislation times and sizeable families – say six to eight – were the norm. By the next generation the fertility rate halved and now it is down below replacement rate at 1.4 (replacement rate is 2.1 children per woman). Women, whose grandmothers maybe had more children back in the day than they would have chosen, are now failing to keep the population up. Why aren’t they doing so? Is this something we should blame women for?
Presenter Miriam O’Callaghan (66) is what you might call a sandwich granny, in the middle of four generations. With a 98-year-old mother, her own eight children and two grandchildren, Miriam looked for the answer to that question. After all, we don’t want to end up like South Korea, visited by Miriam, where the birth rate is 0.8, parents are paid subsidies for children including two million Korean won (about €1,300) on the birth of a child and more nappies are sold for oldies than babies.
Is the housing crisis, which stops people getting on with their adult lives, to blame? Not necessarily, as falling birth rates are common throughout Europe including countries which don’t have a housing problem. Is it because women are now having children later in life at an average age of 33 rather than in their fertile 20s? Or the fact that the better educated women are, the more choices they have and the fewer children? Was it because women couldn’t find a romantic partner – maybe that has got a bit more difficult with dating apps and all that time spent on phones and social media.
Are women the only ones who have children? Surely men play a part in procreation or maybe they are commitment-phobic and don’t want kids. I checked and studies show that men are a bit more enthusiastic about having children. They want 2.8 compared to 2.6 for women on average, although the figure drops for both sexes when confronted with the reality of parenthood.
Maybe a more fundamental explanation is that women’s work in bearing and caring – human work – isn’t valued, not just in a financial sense, but isn’t ‘honoured’ by society. Maybe it’s due to the lack of support for parents when it’s so difficult to raise children when you have to have two incomes to put a roof over your head. Childcare, for instance, which costs around €212 a week before subsidies under the National Childcare Scheme are applied, is just one issue.
Maybe attitudes need to change about older people too. Rather than viewing them as a burden, we should be celebrating them and looking at more imaginative scenarios for allowing people, with up to a third of their lives before them, a fuller role in society. After all, grandparents (especially grannies) provide vital childcare, finance and voluntary work. They know a thing or two and any grandparent, unlike that ill-considered Dublin Rape Crisis Centre advertisement about consent, knows when it’s appropriate to give their grandchildren hugs.
