If you look at yesterday’s immigration and emigration figures solely in terms of Irish citizens, then the country lost a net 4,700 people in the 12 months to April of 2024. Thirty thousand Irish people came back to the country from overseas, thirty-four-thousand-seven-hundred went in the other direction.
If, as others have noted, you include all human traffic in and out of the country, then the population increased by almost 80,000, with another 19,000 being added through the natural process of deaths and births.
What is quite difficult to discern from the figures is an age trend: This is because most people migrate when they are young, and we should therefore expect most immigrants into Ireland to be aged 40 and younger. We might also intuitively expect that returning Irish emigres tend to be a little older. This is hinted at in the figures, but the truth of it is likely obscured by the impact of younger people moving here from overseas:
A breakdown of the overall population shows that the percentage of people over the age of 65 grew from 13.8% to 15.5% between 2018 and 2024, totalling 833,300 people.
Conversely, the number of people aged between 0 and 14 went down by 2% over the same period and now stands at 1,010,300.
The share of the 15 – 24 year age group in the overall population slightly increased from 12.5% in 2018 to 12.7% in 2024. However, the proportional share has decreased for the 25 – 44 year age group, from 28.7% to 27.5% over the same period.
The net impact of all these population trends would appear to be a population, therefore, that is getting marginally older both as a result of migration trends and the reduction in birth rates being accompanied by longer life expectancy on average.
But what larger lessons can we learn?
The first thing to say is that it seems reasonably obvious that an old Irish trend is alive and well: Young people going abroad to start their careers, before some of them return home later in life when they can finally afford to live here. We know, for example, that Australia in particular benefits from the services of Irish nurses and doctors many of whom prefer the option of emigration to years living the hellish life of a trainee in the Irish system.
The second thing we can say is that for all the focus on asylum-seeking, the vast majority of people immigrating to Ireland are doing so legally and for economic reasons, being employed either in the public sector (usually healthcare) or for multinationals in need of engineers (which explains the recent spike in migration from India).
The third thing we can say is that the population is growing far faster than the country is building the necessary infrastructure and homes to accommodate people, which is leading house prices to rise and putting evident strains on the existing public infrastructure.
The fourth thing to say is that the country is producing fewer children while the population is aging, which is going to present several big challenges over the next decades both in terms of paying for pensions, and in terms of the structure of the tax base.
One of the weaknesses of democracy as a form of Government (though it likely remains preferable to other forms) is that Governments elected in five year terms tend to think in five year terms: Policy is geared towards the next election, not towards 2050 or 2060. This is a problem that green advocates are well aware of, and one reason they’ve struggled to get most democracies to take the kinds of measure they insist are necessary to avoid climate disaster. The same is true of population trends: There is almost nothing Government can do on population trends like those above that would make a meaningful impact within five years, and little political benefit to taking measures that would take longer than five years to show an impact. We are therefore reliant, to some degree, on civil servants to recognise any issue and guide successive Governments towards a solution.
That the civil service has done so is perfectly evident, I think, in immigration policy: The large influx of younger people from overseas has already been set out in Government policy papers like project 2040 which projects and plans for a million additional people by that year. The impetus for this, clearly, is to solve the upcoming pensions issue by bringing in new taxpayers to replace those who are not being born.
The problem is that the project 2040 plan has not taken into account the social impact of net migration, which is now playing out on Irish streets and in Irish villages. Civil servants, by their nature, tend to think of people as economic units on a balance sheet rather than as living breathing communities which develop tensions. The role of the politician is to represent those communities and tell the civil service what will, and what will not, fly.
Thus, we are now faced with a situation where more of our own people are leaving than are coming home, even as the population increases on foot of immigration. Is this a good plan? Is it making the country happier? Is it making us better off? Is it impacting crime? Is it impacting social cohesion? Is it impacting the housing market? Is it splitting up families? These are the big questions politicians are supposed to answer, but haven’t.
Instead, the country has been allowed to passively drift into this situation on the basis of rote arguments about how migrants pay their taxes and contribute to the economy. The problem with that argument is that Irish people also pay their taxes and contribute to the economy, but our immigration policy means that there are actually now 4,700 fewer Irish people in Ireland paying taxes and contributing to the economy. Why don’t we talk so much about that?
You can see why some people call it a “great replacement”. Those people are wrong, because that implies strategy and foresight, rather than drift and inertia – but you can see why they say it. It is an objective fact that the country is still a net exporter of Irish people and a net importer of people from elsewhere. Put those two facts together and you get a picture of a country whose policies, somewhere along the line, went badly awry.