It was encouraging to see RTÉ air the first part of a two-part documentary about Ireland’s looming demographic crisis on Wednesday night. Called Ireland’s Population Crash, it was presented by Miriam O’Callaghan, one of the country’s best-known journalists and herself a mother of eight.
While Ireland’s population continues to grow, thanks mainly to immigration, the number of births has fallen sharply over the past decade. The fertility rate stood at just 1.47 children per woman in 2024, well below the replacement level of 2.1.
The programme showed how this is already affecting schools and sports clubs, with falling pupil numbers costing teaching posts and GAA clubs having to amalgamate to field underage teams.
Moreover, as the population ages, a shrinking proportion of workers will have to support a growing number of pensioners.
The documentary explored possible reasons for lower fertility rates: expensive housing and childcare, later marriage, the difficulty of combining work and family life, the growing number of people struggling to find a partner, and infertility.
Economist Dan O’Brien observed that housing alone cannot explain a worldwide trend. David McWilliams questioned the effect of smartphones and online life on relationships, suggesting that young people are increasingly living in a virtual world rather than forming relationships in the real one.
David Quinn, director of the Iona Institute, drew attention to the growing problem of people not having the children they had hoped for:
“The old concern was there’s a lot of unplanned pregnancy, but now there might be a lot of unplanned childlessness. So you just discover life for various reasons has landed you in a situation where you were hoping in your 30s to have children, and then you find it doesn’t work out and you don’t have any children or you have one,” he said.
A recent Iona Institute study forecasts that almost one in four young women could reach the end of their childbearing years without ever having had a child. This contrasts sharply with an earlier opinion poll commissioned by the Institute, which found that the overwhelming majority of Irish people want at least two children.
Women’s increased education and workforce participation were also cited as factors behind declining birth rates. Yet Ireland’s fertility rate was above two children per woman as recently as 2011, when women’s participation in higher education and employment was already well established. Clearly, other factors must also be at play.
Ireland’s fertility rate fell below two in 1992 and hovered around 1.9 until the mid-2000s. It then briefly recovered, exceeding two between 2007 and 2011, before declining sharply to 1.47 in 2024.
As Quinn explained in the documentary:
“To put that in perspective, 1.5 means 100 people can expect 75 children and 56 grandchildren. So you're dropping a quarter per generation. So that's a pretty drastic drop.”
He also highlighted something frequently overlooked in discussions about declining birth rates: religion.
“One of them seems to be to do with declining rates of religious practice. It's kind of noticeable from data everywhere that the more religious practice declines, the more marriage and birth rates decline as well. And the people who do practice tend to get married in higher numbers and have children in bigger numbers as well.”
This connection is explored in another Iona Institute paper, Religion, Marriage and Fertility: Shall the Religious Inherit Ireland?, published last year. It examines evidence that religious people are more likely to marry and have children, suggesting that declining religious practice could further aggravate our demographic problems.
Miriam O’Callaghan also travelled to South Korea, a country with one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, despite substantial government efforts to encourage marriage and childbirth.
Among those interviewed was a young woman belonging to the radical feminist 4B movement, whose members reject dating, sex and marriage with men, as well as motherhood. She argued that women should be free to pursue their lives without the responsibilities of marriage and children.
What was particularly striking was her apparent indifference to the demographic consequences of her position. Asked whether she felt any responsibility to help address South Korea’s falling birth rate, she replied: “Not at all.” When O’Callaghan pressed her on what would happen to the country if nobody had children, her response was simply: “I don’t know. Maybe disappear.”
The exchange captured one of the central dilemmas raised by the documentary: while having children is a personal choice, often constrained by social and economic circumstances, the cumulative consequences of those decisions affect the future of society as a whole.
It is difficult to imagine Ireland reaching the extremes seen in South Korea, where fertility is only about a third of the replacement level. Nevertheless, the direction of travel is deeply worrying.
As David Quinn argued in the programme, we need to take the looming demographic crisis as seriously as we take climate change.
P.S. Some of my recent writings on demography and declining birth rates:
The multiple causes of falling fertility rates — 14 August 2026.
The slow demographic death of Europe — 31 July 2026.
Another report confirms a rise in unplanned childlessness — 9 June 2026.
Lessons from Italy’s catastrophic demographic decline — 17 April 2026.
How to reverse Europe’s free-falling birth rates — 30 January 2026.
Government has stuck its head in the sand over birth rates — 14 November 2025.
How social media could be reducing birth rates — 9 April 2025.
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