There’s something almost amusing about the air of bewilderment that seems to accompany the media offerings on the birth crash that is hurtling Europe towards a financial crash that will make 2008 and Covid look like a walk in the park.
Almost all of the modern world’s economic growth happened on the back of population growth, because no-one prospers unless there’s a market to actually pay for goods and services and support pensions and healthcare and everything else that a modern society demands. But for decades anyone with a working brain and a set of eyes could see that population growth had stalled and fertility was now falling fast.
In fact, the average European fertility rate – the average number of children a woman has – has actually been below the replacement level of 2.1 since the 1970s, which is more than fifty years ago. But for most of my lifetime this has either been ignored or treated like a good thing by the kind of halfwits who unfortunately have far too much access to the corridors of power.
As the map below clearly shows, Europe is a shrinking, ageing continent, though we are still mostly still in denial about what our persistently low birth rates will bring. In 2021, there was one Italian child for every five Italians over the age of 65. It’s an impending disaster that has now reached our shores.
This frequently rudderless state lags decades behind most other countries in facing up to the problem and taking any steps that might assist or persuade people to have what is fast becoming the scarcest of all resources: babies.
Ben Scallan of this parish found out just how ignorant the government and its sycophants in the media are when he first asked a sensible question about what the government was doing to boost fertility at a press conference more than 3 years ago, which was met with titters from other journalists.
He persisted, putting similar questions to Paschal Donohue and Jack Chambers, and mostly getting waffle in return. The real answer is that successive governments did precisely nothing.
In fact, two years ago, Ben asked if Ireland should pursue policies to raise birth rates, only to be told by Chief Economist of the Department of Finance John McCarthy that “Pro-natalist policies have been shown to have virtually no impact” in other countries.
But it turned out that the Department had not actually undertaken a formal analysis of such policies and what did or didn’t work in other countries. Commercial childcare was the only solution trotted out again and again.
As I have written previously, the indifferent and disparaging view of the state was expressed forcefully in refusing to increase Child Benefit EVER in an astonishing 15 years – and in fact actually decreasing between 2012 and 2016 – despite the endless clamour about the cost of living crisis. Are children not a cost of living?
Parents doing the most important job in the country have been given the same miserly sum – €140 per month per child – for 15 years and we’re told that is not about to change. In real terms, that’s a decrease of about 40% in child benefit payments when inflation is taken into account. That is an unmitigated disgrace – and wholly indicative of the disregard the state has for the only people tackling the collapse in births: parents of children.
And as I have previously pointed out, because I am writing about this consistently and will do so until I am blue in the face, it’s not the case that parents are looking for handouts – the child benefit payment was meant to replace the child tax credit which was a deduction from taxes that acknowledged the cost of raising children (and providing the country with a future).
Except it didn’t. As the Parliamentary Budget Office noted two years ago, Child Benefit “has not kept pace with either inflation or wage growth”:
“In real terms, this means the 2022 rate of €140 will be €129.47 (2011 base). With 2011 as a base, the rate in 2022 would need to be €151.38 to stay in line with inflation over the period and would need to be €173.58 to stay in line with wage growth. This divergence from price and wage growth is most evident in 2021 and 2022, with the flat rate losing ground compared to the accelerating inflation and wage growth.
So when other payments were being adjusted to reflect “accelerating inflation and wage growth” the government refused to increase child benefit. None of this makes any sense, unless we consider the only strategy ever referenced in any state document on the demographic collapse, which is that we must rely on immigration, and to hell with our ancient culture and our identity.
Now RTÉ, which happily promoted with much of the cultural and social engineering that led to such negative views towards having children, now seems to have woken up to the problem: a bit like the government, doing too little too late.
Miriam O’Callaghan, who in fairness has 8 children and a positive attitude towards same, has made a two-part documentary on the birth crash, seeking to find answers as to how we find ourselves in this position. She might do well to look through the archives of RTÉ and other media outlets to see a pattern of wholly disparaging attitudes towards marriage and having children, and the careful inculcation of the idea that both were bad for women and for the planet.
The first of the programmes is to be aired tonight – and we’re told that at some stage South Korea is visited and questions asked as to how their baby bust was arrived at. It would probably serve RTÉ better to ask this ridiculous, short-sighted government why Child Benefit has not increased in 15 years.