Taiwan is currently struggling with a wave of school closures that is only set to worsen in the coming years. The reason? After decades of falling births, there are no longer enough children to fill the classrooms.
In this, it is not unlike the rest of east Asia, China being the most obvious example, and consequential example. Taiwan has been struggling without success since the 1980s to achieve the ‘replacement rate’ of 2.1 babies per woman that is required to maintain a stable population. In 2023, its rate was just 0.86 babies per woman.
And so schools are closing. Does a demographic crash manifest itself so obviously – so morbidly, in a sense – everywhere? Apparently, yes. During my time reporting with The Irish Catholic, I spoke with a Columban priest based outside of the South Korean capital, Seoul, for over 40 years. Musing about the various geopolitical challenges the country faced, ranging from its belligerent northern neighbour to its titanic western neighbour, he confessed that possibly the most pressing issue the country was facing was internal.
When he arrived, he said, children were everywhere. Now they’re nowhere. Schools and universities are closing. Shops are slowly seeing their childcare sections replaced by ‘petcare’ sections. Meanwhile in Japan, in one of the saddest signs of the times this writer can remember, a nappy maker announced earlier this year that it will stop producing diapers for babies in the country in favour of supplying the market for adults.
The writing is clearly on the wall for many east Asian nations, but what about us? Unfortunately, it’s the same story.
Eurostat gave Ireland’s ‘Total Fertility Rate’ (TFR) as 1.54 births per woman in 2022, well below that same replacement level that Taiwan has been struggling to reach and fast heading downwards. Ireland is not alone in Europe when it comes to having difficulty with having children (not a single country in Europe meets the 2.1 level), but obviously it’s the scenario we have most to be worried about.
Worry about? So some people ask when they hear these concerns expressed. Yes, definitely. In fact, we should be worrying about this an awful lot more than we currently are, which is not at all.
The ‘dependency ratio’ is just one reason why. This is an age-population ratio of those typically not in the labour force (the dependent part being from ages 0-14 and 65+) and those typically in the labour force (between the ages mentioned above, so 15 to 64). It is used to measure the pressure on the productive population, and it is very important for a country to have a low one if it wants to maintain a high standard of living.
What a low dependency ratio means is that there are enough people working to sustain the dependent population – which is what we’ve enjoyed in recent decades – enabling reasonable pensions and healthcare, among other things.
A high ratio, on the other hand, indicates a less sustainable relationship between the number of people working and the number of dependents in the population. Moving into an age of increased social unrest as we are, I personally find it hard to believe that the financial stresses and strains this will impose on the ‘productive’ population will be received peacefully. More likely, there will be significant protests and backlash.
The trouble is, we’ve already moved so far that these warnings from around the world are coming too late. The coming catastrophe can’t be altered, only mitigated, but even doing that is unpopular. The Oireachtas Social Protection Committee late last year proposed raising the retirement age to 75, a suggestion that has been left untouched to date. And no wonder, when potential pension reforms sparked serious riots France earlier that year. That legislation was nothing so controversial as the Oireachtas committee suggested, a mere raising of the retirement age from 62 to 64 years, with the condition that the retiree has worked at least 43 years.
Efforts to boost birthrates aren’t proving overly effective, either. Hungary, which over the past decade was much lauded for its policy efforts to boost its birthrate, initially showed promise but quickly appears to have run out of steam. Reports indicate that 2023 was a number of particularly low births, after years of hard work on the part of the Hungarian government to incentivise having children. Similarly in Poland, initiatives like tax breaks and increased child benefit have done nothing to spare the country one of the lowest TFRs in Europe: 1.29 in 2022.
Does this mean that we shouldn’t incentivise having children, because it’s a waste of time with regards to turning the birthrate around? Of course not – indeed, it’s a great place to start. But it can’t end there. Cultural change is required, that not only enables but effectively encourages family formation and the sense that having children is a sufficiently good thing to suffer for, a sense that clearly hasn’t been inculcated yet in Hungary.
Meanwhile, we continue to neither incentivise childbirth nor facilitate the necessary cultural change. The age limit to avail of free contraception keeps rising (Minister Stephen Donnelly ensuring the scheme expanded to include women aged 32-35 in recent months), while Child Benefit hasn’t been increased in 13 years, to name but two facets of the issue.
This is a problem we can ignore for now, but not forever. When our schools start closing, we’ll start noticing. By then, it’ll be too late for an easy fix, if, as I say, it isn’t already.
Muslims, Roma and others here have plenty of kids. They like our social welfare system
They’ll have full run of the Dáil in the next 15 years too, especially the first lot you mentioned.
Ban the burka debate should be had asap ,in other EU countries who have had Muslim in their countries for longer than us have already banned the burka , paddy has got to realise the floodgates have been opened , coveney over in Bilderberg last week surely planning the next chapter
There should be no welcome in any country for ideologies that repress, restrict and treat females as badly as Islam treats its women and young girls – YET, the GAA rents out space at Croke Park to Islam for prayer based on inclusion (yet Islam excludes its females from attending Croke Park) and excludes them from the same equal rights as its men.
I don’t know about the Roma, but Muslims are almost as badly off. It’s only the real sh*thole Muslim countries — Pakistan, Egypt, etc — that are reproducing at the replacement level and above.
Majority or Roma had the Itelligence not to take the so called Vax😁😁😁and gave the leftover Vax to Ireland who ran like idiots to get the jab..roma aren’t as foolish as people think,all those countries that had a taste of communism are very wary of governments and rightly so….the majority of the Muslims also are unvaxxed so both the Roma and themselves are very fertile to produce children any vaxed nation are going to become sterile…that’s the agenda why kill with bombs when you can kill with the needle.
Yes! — why the heck do you think I bother commenting here? — low birthrates *combined with mass migration* means demographic doom — Ireland can survive low birthrates and still be Irish — but it cannot survive mass migration and still be Irish.
No responsible country should 1) give up its own currency, or 2) open its borders.
Its the hard working men and women who can’t have kids.It will all implode eventually. Very few mortgage paying people can afford one parent to stay at home and mind multiple children. Then again very few people want to sit at home minding kids or spending years and years pregnant.
The irish travellers are still banging out the kids but i think that might be even slowing down considering more of the young traveller females are working.
So we can rely on our roma and muslim friends to get the population up and to work hard and pay our pensions.That would be my wish when retired,to know some josef pushka is working to pay my pension and not out lurking around looking for prey to try rape and strangle.
Something that doesnt get enough attention in Ireland is all the people over 66 in Ireland who are able bodied and still working.Anybody i know, who can work,is working.All aged 66 to 76 and working part time. None of whom were in the civil service mind you.So there lies the problem.Too many good pensions for some and none for the rest.A lot of teachers and gaurds retire and allow themselves to just rot.
Some retirees play an active part in the community
Completely agree and in the future i hope i can do the same and work until i drop.
The command to Adam and Eve to increase and multiply has obviously been discarded as an outmoded unscientific piece of rhetoric and an article of carbon footprint propaganda.
Great article.It’s staring the west in the face but we’re doing nothing about.
They are, persecution of our own lower and middle classes with financial hardship and deportation and bankrolling the invited guests with free housing and endless financial leg ups to multiply like roaches. They really couldn’t be doing more to exterminate our own to be honest. Oh and wait till they change further laws against the national will.
Free Enoch Burke.
An article to help free Enoch Burke would be refreshing
Does the government not understand…. PEOPLE CAN NOT AFFORD TO HAVE CHILDREN!!!! They have and cannot get a family home. They try to survive with sky high rents, sky high taxes, sky high childcare costs, transport costs, food costs among others.
It’s not that people are unable to have children or are unwilling to have children it is in the majority of cases they cannot afford them.
This government is responsible for the declining childbirth rate in Ireland
Population explosion to population implosion.
Hard to keep up !
Most of these studies use present trends/numbers and model a hypothetical future scenario. I could use the same data, devise an alternative model and come to a different result.
I sense Gript are soft-pushing a hidden pro-immigration agenda as-of-late.
I enjoy listening to all views but dislike being played for a fool.
Well Barry, I suggest you look outside of Gript to check the numbers. This has been staring the West in the face for well over a decade. You might start here: https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/total-fertility-rate/country-comparison. I would be interested in you unbiased conclusions …
I feel the first thing we need to do is stop referring to it as the fertility rate when its in fact the reproductive rate that has dropped. Truth is successive governments have prioritised working over child rearing. That must be addressed. Massive tax cuts for the third child and cash bonuses for subsequent ones. Families must be able to live and thrive on one income. Along with and linked to immigration the plummeting reproduction rate is a direct consequence of corporatism and until their influence over politicians is severed we wont see the changes necessary.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/kQXXOooyXkCi/
The truth is coming out right across the world to wake up those stupid people that are still asleep as the narrator of this 5 min piece says “we are discovering we had a murderer in our house” Kansas and Texas taking Pfizer to court for killing their children,50% of the pregnant women had life threatening issues and 10% of I fants died.
I think only Georgia managed to increase their fertility rate. That was by giving religious incentives (the 3rd child in a family would be baptised by a bishop or something like that). It wouldn’t fly in Ireland.
The only way to incentivise birth rates is by changing culture. The only developed economy in the Western world with fertility rate above replacement rate is Israel. Again, it’s not the secular Jews having the children. A country like India, which is relatively poor, has a TFR below replacement rate. And I suspect Indians face far more social pressure to have children compared to Ireland.
So the options are:
(1) increase pension age and increase taxation continuously (in Ireland, this will result in more people emigrating from the country for better pastures elsewhere)
(2) increase immigration to have more working age population (demographic changes have to be slow in order for time to integrate people)
(3) opt for a lower quality of life; a decreasing population is not inherently bad
Doesn’t help when our children are killed off either, over 300 BABIES dead since the rollout of the poison jab in 2020 and the powers that be think that is normal?????not to mention selfish women aborting/killing their children in the womb no excuse women….sure if the parents cant see the tsunami of deaths all around them since the mRNA rollout there’s no hope for humanity…the greedy people that know all the answers ,the government and undertakers not to mention doctors,nurses, pharmacists and big pharma sold their souls like Judas for mammon…their days are numbered for judgment and it will come swift and fast with the imminent return of Christ .
The politicians are perfectly willing to make completely RADICAL life and culture changing commitments, on a planetary scale, to stem the so-called ‘climate crisis’. This demographic crisis has far more real, measurable and imminent consequences – it needs a similar level of attention and commitment.
Where on earth is this likely to rank in Irish general election voters priorities or exit polls? Just when you think Catholic Conservatives are learning the lessons of the last elections we have to read this retrograde crap!!