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Sat 08 Aug 2008Figuring out the future
PRESENT TENSE:BACK IN THE dark days of late-1980s Ireland, when unemployment and emigration were at their height, the then tánaiste, the late Brian Lenihan, in an interview with Newsweek magazine, offered the opinion that, "after all, we can't all live on a small island".
What would Lenihan have made of this week's Eurostat report, which predicts that, by 2060, there will be 6.7 million people living in the Republic of Ireland? That figure represents a 58 per cent increase from the 4.4 million of us currently crammed shoulder-to-shoulder from Malin to Mizen. How will we cope?
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