A history of Irish Population

The numbers game

Our demographic balance sheet has always been a barometer of national self-confidence writes Kevin Whelan

We know few precise details about the scale of the Irish population prior to the modern era. When St Patrick landed in 432, he was preaching to about three full Croke Parks - a quarter of a million people.

By the medieval period, the population may have reached about half a million, and grew slowly thereafter to about one million in 1500.

At this stage, Ireland attracted significant immigration by the Normans of adjacent Britain, especially from the Welsh borderlands and southern England.

Today, any Kilkenny, Wexford, or Tipperary hurling team will feature a backbone of Norman descendants - Keatings, Comerfords, Prendergasts, Barrys, Fitzhenrys.

By 1700, with immigration from Britain and internal changes affecting both birth and death rates, the population had doubled, the most rapid transformation in Europe. The plantations attracted significant, if regionally limited, concentrations of newcomers, although the greatest influx came from Scotland into east Ulster in the post-plantation period as Scotland suffered economic stagnation.

The population doubled again in the 18th century to reach 4.4 million in 1791. This demographic revolution depended on the integration of Ireland into the expanding British state, and its parallel integration into the North Atlantic economy. From being an island behind an island on the rainy rim of western Europe, Ireland now became the last European stepping-stone to America.

The potato, one driver of the population surge, was an attractive proposition in Irish circumstances, because it tolerated a wet climate. With milk added, it formed a balanced diet and facilitated the shift in population density from east to west, and from good land to poor land. The potato, not Oliver Cromwell, peopled the west of Ireland.

Developments in the 19th century pushed more and more Irish people into dependence on the potato. By the 1830s, three million "potato people" relied on the tuber for over 90 per cent of their calorie intake. In these circumstances, a failure of the crop would decimate a population that had swelled to 8.5 million by 1845.

The potato blight of that year precipitated disaster. One million died and two million emigrated in the next two decades, cruelly paralleling the three million "potato people".

The Famine accelerated the existing emigration flow from Ireland. Irish emigration became unique in its scale, duration, and geographical spread.

Since 1700, 10 million Irish people have emigrated and since 1800 one out of every two people born on the island has emigrated. By 1850, New York, with over a quarter of a million Irish-born residents, was the most Irish city in the world. The Irish contributed six of the 60 million Europeans who migrated to the US in the 19th century - over 10 times what one might expect on the basis of existing population.

AS IRISH POPULATION figures crashed in the second half of the 19th century, endemic and pervasive emigration became the black hole at the centre of Irish culture. The Irish family was buffeted in a treacherous sea of breakdown and dispersal; the Irish sense of place was shadowed by an all too prevalent displacement.

By the 20th century, emigration had eaten its way into the heart of the Irish experience. It had become a commonplace of Irish nationalist discourse to blame Irish emigration on perfidious British policies, therefore the continuation of Irish emigration at high levels under native government was traumatic. Even more distressingly, much of it was now heading to Britain. The humiliating demographics, economic stagnation and cultural introversion reached its nadir in the 1950s.

By then, the collapse of the population was triggering a despairing sense of the failure of the entire independence project, that the revolution had created a failed state and a dismal economy, not the transformation of the country. The radical measures then taken did create a welcome demographic respite in the 1960s, only for a relapse to occur in the 1970s and the 1980s, a decade almost as bad as the horrible 1950s. Government minister Brian Lenihan said bluntly: "We can't all live on a small island."

The Tiger years ushered in another turnaround, and in 1996 immigration exceeded emigration in the Republic. In few states can the demographic balance sheet remain so vital a measure of national self-confidence - a legacy of the long-standing centrality of emigration to the culture.

Given the economic surge, recent predictions have been of sustained demographic growth in the medium term, much of it driven by immigration. Within a generation, 20 per cent of the population may not have been born in Ireland. A recent report suggested that 167 languages are now used in Ireland, ranging from Acholi and Arabic to Zaghawa and Zulu.

We should perhaps consider the wider problem of collapsing populations in Europe over the next 50 years. UN figures suggest that the current 725 million in Europe will fall back to 600 million by 2050, a loss of 125 million people. In 14 countries, population is already falling, and elsewhere it is largely static.

Without immigration, population stability requires an average birth rate of 2.1 per woman and only Albania in Europe currently meets that target. The historically high Irish birth rate is now converging towards the European norm. Even corrective social policies - as in Sweden - and increased immigration will not redress the balance.

Given current trends, the German population will halve in a century from 82 million to 40 million, in Italy from 57 million to 20 million. Ironically these changes will be accompanied by increased population pressure in successful economic regions, notably the south of England, the Paris basin, and northern Italy.

These trends are perhaps already visible in the hinterland of Dublin and the increased demographic concentration there - in 2002, 60 per cent of Irish population were urbanised and that figure is likely to intensify inexorably. The visible results are already with us - house price inflation, difficulty of access for first time buyers, delayed marriage, decreased marriage rates and depressed fertility.

Long-term perspectives, both backward- and forward-looking, should unsettle the crust of complacency that has so rapidly congealed in Tiger Ireland.

Professor Kevin Whelan is Michael J Smurfit Director of the Keough Notre Dame Centre in Dublin.