At a press conference last week, Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe was asked by Gript journalist, Ben Scallan, whether Ireland should adopt pro-natalist policies to raise our very low birth rate. The context was the launch of a major new report looking ahead to 2065 and the financial challenges we will face, including from a fast-ageing population. The report looks almost exclusively to immigration as a solution to this problem. Both Minister Donohoe and the Department of Finance’s Chief Economist, John McCarthy, who was sitting beside him, essentially told Scallon there is nothing we can do to increase births.
Donohoe said that the number of children people have “is a choice for families”, while McCarthy said that “pro-natalist policies have been shown to have virtually no impact” elsewhere.
The Government plainly does not want to discuss Ireland’s plunging birth rate, because doing so would invite scrutiny of the policies that have made it so difficult for young people to start families. Yet, in the same interview, both Donohoe and McCarthy confirmed that the Government seeks to make daycare more affordable in order “to help families.” This alone undermines their claim. If daycare policies can help families, then clearly public policy can influence family formation and fertility rates. The real question is which policies the Government chooses to promote.
Minister Donohoe insists family size is a “choice.” Ireland’s fertility rate is now just 1.5, well below the replacement level of 2.1. But are people truly choosing to have so few children? According to an Amarach poll from 2022 which was commissioned by The Iona Institute, 36pc of Irish adults want two children, 35pc want three, and 13pc want four. This averages out at 2.7 children each. The gap between the number of children people want and the number they actually have reveals that economic and cultural pressures, and not necessarily personal preference, are suppressing family formation.
One of the strongest economic influences on the ability to start a family is the cost of housing. A new paper Build, Baby, Build: How Housing Shapes Fertility shows that rising housing costs, particularly for family-sized homes, directly reduce birth rates. Larger families need more space, and when rents or mortgages for multi-bedroom units soar, couples delay or forego having children. The study found that building more family-sized housing is far more effective (2.3 times more) in increasing births than simply increasing the supply of small apartments. Using U.S. data and a dynamic housing-fertility model, the paper estimates that if housing costs had remained at 1990 levels, the United States would have seen 11pc more births, roughly 13 million additional children, between 1990 and 2020. In other words, unaffordable housing is a major drag on birth rates.
In Ireland, where home ownership has become a dream for many young couples, the same logic applies. While housing availability and affordability is not the only factor pushing down birth rates, it is a significant one, to judge by this new paper.
Other social dynamics, from career focus to the postponement of marriage, also shape how people view family life, and they too require thoughtful policy and cultural engagement.
This government, like the previous one, relies on immigration to compensate for the fall in births but immigration cannot fix a collapsing birth rate, since migrants themselves are mostly coming from countries where fertility rates have dropped below replacement level, for example, Brazil and India.
When politicians dismiss the issue or hide behind the language of “choice,” they reveal a lack of moral seriousness about the country’s long-term future.
If we do not put family formation at the heart of our social and economic policies, we will discover too late that the real “choice” we made was decline.
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