Number of births decrease with access to childcare and housing attributed to decline

The number of births decreased by almost 14 per cent in the first quarter of this year when compared to the same period in 2022, according to new figures from the Central Statistics Office (CSO).

The drop has been attributed to the economic and societal factors that facilitate having children, such as childcare and the housing crisis.

On Friday, the CSO published its latest vitality statistics for the first three months of 2023, which recorded 13,968 births, down from the 16,131 births in the same period the previous year, a decrease of 13.4 per cent.

The number of babies born in Ireland has declined over the past decade, with the country having one of the highest birth rates in Europe in 2013.

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The number of babies born in the State increased in 2021 for the first time since 2009, however, a rise that was attributed to the Covid-19 pandemic. The number of births continued to be high in the first three months of 2022 but dropped in the early months of this year.

The average age of all mothers in the first quarter of 2023 was 33.2 years, which is a decrease from 33.3 years as recorded in Q1 2022, while 10 years ago the average age was 32.1 years for the same period.

More than two in five births in the first three months of the year were outside marriage or civil partnership.

Dr Carmel Hannan, associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Limerick, said the increase in the number of births during the pandemic was just a “blip” and has not been a long-term trend.

“People who had been postponing for a variety of reasons reflected on it, they were home together and they realised there was no need to postpone. In an Irish context, that increase in births was driven by the older cohort so women 35 to 40 and 40 to 45,” she said.

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“It meant both partners were at home so they could try. There are conversations about facilitating [child birth] and in the Irish case, it’s really about childcare. If you have kids, who is going to look after them if both parents are working?”

Edgar Morgenroth, economics professor at Dublin City University, said this could be attributed to the economic situation of the country, with most recent figures showing a record high employment rate in the State at 74.2 per cent.

“If everybody is working, childcare is expensive so maybe they’re not going to have as many kids. And everyone is working because, of course, housing is expensive. And for that age group, these things matter. There’s a squeeze affecting that particular demographic,” he said.

“[The initial rise in births] could be the Covid babies when people had nothing better to do. But, then, reality bites, and you’ve to go back to work. You had the eviction ban and a whole lot of things were fairly static, you were where you were during the pandemic.”

Meanwhile, there were also 10,205 deaths in the first quarter of the year, which is 670 deaths higher than during the same period last year, according to the CSO.

Cancer and circulatory disease were the biggest causes of death in Ireland during the time period examined, accounting for 5,534, or 54.2 per cent, of deaths.