“No longer shall our children, like our cattle, be brought up for export” then-President of the Executive Council, Eamon de Valera in the Dail in 1934
It is a bittersweet coincidence that today, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) publishes two reports – one is the population estimate for the State at April 2012 which claims that 87,100 people emigrated in the year to April, and the other is the livestock slaughterings report for August 2012. It seems that once again, our children are in fact being raised like livestock for export. The population of the State in April 2012 is estimated to have been 4,585,400 an increase of 10,500 over the previous year. The 10,500 increase comprises births of 74,000, deaths of 29,200, emigration of 87,100 and immigration of 52,700. Emigration is estimated to have increased from 80,600 the previous year and is now at the highest absolute level since at least 1987 and just below the rate per 1,000 population that emigrated in 1989. Last year’s emigration estimate means that an average of 240 people emigrated for each of the 365 days.
The low annual increase will have an impact on residential property demand. If we simply take the 10,500 increase and apply the average of 2.7 persons per household, we need 4,000 homes for the increased population. Of course our households are also fragmenting at a rate which suggests we need 17,000 new homes each year just to accommodate smaller household sizes. And there is also obsolescence of existing property which isn’t really measured in Ireland. Back in 2010, the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis figured we had an overhang of vacant property of over 100,000 units, so nationally we continue to have an overhang.
Ireland is unique on the planet for seeing its population today below the level in the 1840s. Yes we had a famine which saw 2.5m die or emigrate, yes we were under permanent occupation by our hostile neighbour which partly resulted in the Industrial Revolution bypassing the country, but even after liberation in the 1920s it was still 50 years before the decline in population really started to reverse. We may have missed the Industrial Revolution, but with the aid of foreign direct investment, we leapfrogged to the Information Age. We have a peaceful country with no military enemies, untouched by natural disasters with an abundance of natural resources to sustain ourselves, yet we have again returned to mass emigration on a scale seen in the 1950s and 1980s.
This is a man-made disaster.
[The table at the top of this blogpost extracts information in today’s CSO publication and calculates annual population, birth, death and emigration rates per 1,000. The second table was produced on here and originally published in August 2011]
NAMA Wine Lake 
[…] 240 Of Us Are Emigrating Every Day According To Latest Population Estimate (NamaWineLake) […]
In truth the reason the Industrial Revolution missed Ireland wasn’t because of British protectionism as Irish historians are keen to whiningly imply. It has everything to do with the lack of a quality fuel source (coal) and a lack of iron.
I would suggest that to fully understand the real effect of current emigration it is necessary to analyze their demographic pool and their individual qualities. Calculating numbers from the global population does not do justice to the harm done to the country.
I am not fully sure whether the figures completely reflect the situation.
If you compare child benefit claims for children born in the years 1998 to 2009, there was a decline in claims between 2010 & 2011 of 5878, (figures sourced from DSP’s Annual Statistical Report 2010 & 2011).
A small proportion of the decline may relate to children not resident in this State and resident in another EU country, but who had a parent resident and in employment here who has headed home in the interim. However the CSO figures suggest that there was net immigration of 3,000 in the 12 months to April 2012 of children between 0 & 14 (Table 5, page 6 of the CSO Report).
Something doesn’t add up.
We are obviously not a nation of mathematicians. It should be calculated on an annual basis.
You take a base year – the last census.
Add the births in that year and subtract the deaths.
Add everyone who left by plane or ship in the year
Deduct everyone who came into the country.
Adjust for actual date of census.
And lo-and-behold you have calculated the approximate net migration for that year.
You now have a new base year. Repeat as necessary on an annual basis.
Q.E.D.
@ WSTT The problem is that not all of the information you suggest is gathered. There is also movement along the land border. For a large proportion of the population of the State, airports and ports within the “occupied territories” are the natural points of departure and arrival.
Even countries with a Civil Law structure and an obligation on all residents to register their place of residence have serious problems calculating migration trends.
Whoops…. that should be deduct everyone who left by plane or ship and add everyone who came into the country.
It must be Freudian. I think that it’s more positive to leave.
No. It is an Irish-made disaster. This is the fate that the country has chosen for itself: to forever raise its children for export.
The people leaving the country are the very ones with the motivation to change it. What’s left behind is an increasingly stale slag, capable of little apart from lying inert. Eventually, someone with throw it all out.
We could have a different country. We could have a better future. But instead we choose leaders and values that make a better future impossible, and a poorer Ireland inevitable.
We don’t demand better, so we get worse. And in the end, there’s no-one left to blame–not the British, not the church, not the Europeans—no-one except for ourselves.
I agree and I despair in equal measure.
It being Friday, I hope NWL will indulge a little poetic commentary on Ireland & its inhabitants:
“Stony seaboard, far and foreign,
Stony hills poured over space,
Stony outcrop of the Burren,
Stones in every fertile place,
Little fields with boulders dotted,
Grey-stone shoulders saffron-spotted,
Stone-walled cabins thatched with reeds,
Where a Stone Age people breeds
The last of Europe’s stone age race.”
From John Betjeman’s ‘Ireland with Emily’: http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/john_betjeman/poems/831
Ireland. The Sow that eats her own farrow.
The CSO emigration data for 2006-2011 was utterly wrong when compared with the gold standard census data. As the methodology has not changed, we can expect that the estimates presented continue to be inaccurate. Not just a little: they were out by 100k last time around.
The headline figure that 240 of us a day are leaving does not mention that the CSO counted 144 immigrants arriving every day (56 of them returning Irish) nor does it mention the 202 babies born in Ireland every day. The population is still increasing as it has been for the past 50 years. The new births figure is likely to be accurate but the emigration number was massively overstated in the past.
Ireland is a small island nation and it is healthy that young people head off and educate themselves in the cultures and norms of the world before coming home. How else are we to compete globally without the knowledge that can be gained from working and studying abroad? If the population were falling or aging we might worry – but it is not. The Irish are youthful and our population is heading ever upwards.
NWL you are not a politician required to emit populist rubbish to win approval. You can afford to tell the truth so why write sentimental nonsense evoking past eras of genuine suffering and forced migration? Ireland is a high pay wealthy country with a burgeoning highly educated youthful people.
@Ian
The CSO has revised the way in which it measures emigration and immigration, and no doubt the change has come about after the large estimating error you refer to in 2006-2011. There is a blogpost on the changes here.
https://namawinelake.wordpress.com/2012/09/20/at-last-cso-reforms-the-way-it-estimates-emigration/
With respect to your opinion, I disagree with you, and believe that emigration on the scale now recorded is a tragedy. Of course there is always a level of lifestyle emigration but it is not a coincidence that with the decline in our economy that emigration has once again returned to levels akin to those in the 1980s and 1950s. That is not to say that emigration is the curse that it was in Peig Sayers time where taking the boat was close enough to a death. Certainly Ryanair, Skype, wealth, education and ambition have all transformed the emigration experience. And there will be parents in Ireland who are glad that their children are seeing another part of the world, broadening their experience which will improve their lives. But I know there are many others heart-broken by the absence of their children and fear that the planned two year stint may become permanent through lack of opportunity at home.
I disagree with you that Ireland is wealthy. Our annual deficit is €13bn.
It is not a tragedy that young Irish people seek to improve their education or work experience at first class institutions and employers around the world. This enriches the country. If you are a 40 yr old blocklayer with no education, on the other hand, then you’re in trouble. Aging, uneducated labourers at the end of a long, credit-led, building boom are always going to be screwed although the state is offering them some re-education options.
A lot of Irish emigration now consists of returning immigrants. If my Swedish aupair goes home at the end of the year so she can go to college, she will be added to the emigrant data, each one a tragedy cosúil leis an bás. Ochón,ochón.
In fact, if we strip out the Swedish aupairs and Polish cleaners and Amercians who’ve finished college and Brazilian lapdancers, we have a net 25.9K Irish emigrants last year. This is nowhere near to 1980s levels of emigration. I am guessing you are a child to even make this comparison. Dublin in the 1980s was like Pyongyang. People even wore the Korean anoraks.
The deficit is not a measure of wealth, it is a measure of the state choosing to overspend on social programs for its own citizens. Household net worth stands at €448bn or €100k per head according to the central bank. Our relative position in Europe has fallen but still. Just look around you. To think I will have to tell my grandchildren we had it so bad that people had to queue for the new iPhone.
Click to access The%20Impact%20of%20the%20Financial%20Turmoil%20on%20Households%20A%20Cross%20Country%20Comparison.pdf
Well worth a read,senior Irish emigrant at GS.
“I think Irish people, generally, are a little wary of emigrants. Emigration is so much part of Irish life. We speak very well of people who go away and do well. But we get a little concerned when those people come back and tell us how things could have been done better. As Richard Harris tells Tom Berenger in [the film version of] The Field, “Go home, Yank. Go home.” There’s an element of that in Irish life. And I think official Ireland – and by that I mean not the agencies but Dublin, be it government or public sector – is struggling to figure out the next leg of this Diaspora thing.”
He stated there was a European bias in Ireland that militated against the American Irish contribution.
“Official Ireland is very European focused. They’ve been working as part of the ECC and then the EU since 1973. This may sound politically incorrect, but the vast majority of the Irish Diaspora that can have any influence on the situation is in the United States, and to some degree in the U.K. So you’ve got a bit of a challenge in that you’ve got public sector, European-focused official Ireland trying to figure out what to do about private sector, U.S.-based ex-pats, and official Ireland seems to me a lot more focused on how to control this as distinct from how to enable it.”
Read more: http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Irish-too-often-spurn-Diaspora-advice-says-top-Wall-Street-figure-170882251.html#ixzz27llOlyW6
@ Ian c what happens if/when they don’t come home ?
There is a certain level of vitriol and inward thinking towards emigrants be they based still abroad or returning to Ireland,trying to ‘help’.I emigrated in 1991 to London,Toronto and now New York.
Based on personal experiences or anecdotal, the most worrying aspect of this recent surge in emigration should be the quality of those leaving and their disdain for ‘home’.The ones in NY are extremely motivated, highly educated,driven very smart and in no hurry home.It does truly appear that the ‘best and brightest’ are leaving in droves.
Below is the original article from an extremely interesting successful proud Irishman,this pretty much says it all about ‘Modern Ireland’.
“The most surprising instance he mentioned was the offer made by Craig Barrett, the former chairman and CEO of Intel, to sit – without pay – on any state board in Ireland. “Any other institution in the world within 20 minutes would have signed him up, but Craig Barrett is still waiting to get a call from Dublin,” Jones said, his eyebrows slightly raised. “There’s a reason for that, and to me it comes down to the fact that Craig Barrett isn’t part of the Irish system, so he isn’t beholden to anybody. He’ll call it the way he sees it. I think official Ireland is anxious about that.”
http://irishamerica.com/2012/09/adrian-jones-wall-street-50-keynote-interview/
@Kieran there is always time for poetry,this is a tremendous app. the wonderful,sadly recently deceased Irishwoman Josephine Hart was behind it.
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/the-poetry-app/id501967950?mt=8