According to the Central Statistics Office, the number of people moving to Ireland last year dropped. A little more than 80,000 people moved here in the 12 months to April 2008, which was down from the 100,000+ that moved here in the 12 months previous to that.
The number of people leaving the country is estimated at 45,000, with a big chunk of the leavers going to Australia (and with the weather, who would blame them?).
We are producing offspring like crazy and the number of births is now, once again more than three times the number of deaths - so my job is safe in 18 years time. Apparently we have produced 72,300 newborns in the last 12 months. That’s some amount of producing!! At the end of april 1994, the number of births recorded in the 12 months before was only 16,000.
I have actually noticed that a number of people I know are having their third and fourth child, which was very uncommon in the past decade. Big families are the new big thing.
So, this means that with families expanding, the need for houses is surely still there, so house prices won’t stay falling forever. The number of people in the country still seems to be expanding, but more slowly than previously. Its probably a good time to get a job as a childminder or teacher and all going well, when I’m old there will be workers to pay into pension schemes.
Whew!
7 users commented in " Emigration and immigration in Ireland "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackIt’s true! More and more folk I know that have kids are adding to the crew, three or four or even five in some cases. Don’t know how they have the energy-or space.
or money.
right, or money. Although the general consensus seems to be mom stays at home once there is more than 2 kids, thus eliminating creche fees, the bane of working parents the world over. And as my good friend with three boys said, it’s as easy to look after three or four as two. She could also be insane from sleep deprivation.
The rest of the western world would envy you this. At the moment in the US there is a glut of baby boomers about to retire which will more or less bannkrupt social security and there are not enough younger people to step up and replenish the coffers.
In Scotland, the birthrate has fallen to 1.6 or something adn people are being urged to “do it for the country”!
You can imagine the lines: Just lie back and think of Scotland, baby - don’t think of it as me trying to get my leg over! Think of it as your duty as a good patriotic Scotswoman!
with families expanding, the need for houses is surely still there, so house prices won’t stay falling forever
You have to be careful here about the direction of cause and effect. Is our population growing predominantly because of fertility rates or because of net immigration. I think it’s net immigration. As far as I know our fertiliy rate is only slightly above the replacement rate and over that last decade population growth was primarily (though not soley) boosted by immigration.
But immigrants come because the economy is good. When it falters, they eventually stop coming here. That leaves our fertility rate - which may also fall to or below the replacement rate if the economy is weaker (people delay having children until they find secure jobs which are harder to find etc).
Incidentally I think your figures for birth rates are askew. According to the CSO there were 48,000 births in 1994. Way lower, I agree than the figure for today, but that was based off a significantly smaller base population and it is the rate not the absolute number of births which is important. The rate now, true, is higher than in 1994, but not by all that much (15.2 per 1000 now versus 13.5 per 1000 then)
So all of a sudden the population growth is gone which you argue would revive the housing market.
There is another caveat. Before the housing market headed sharply south many ‘experts’ said that while prices might soften, there’d be no hard drop because of our ‘demographics’. There were plenty of young people, the argument ran, who would need houses. But that was also true in 1987 - there were tens of thousands of young people. But the economy provided them with plane tickets instead of jobs so they weren’t adding to the demand for houses.
Demographics are certainly an input in long term trends, but I would say, given the volatile immigrant component, they are not terribly useful here in predicting the depth or duration of the property slump.
OK,I got my figures from some news feed on the 16,000 in 1994 - it seemed a bit low to me.
Hmm, must go off an re-think the rate of growth thing. Incidentally, I saw someplace recently where it was predicted that Ireland’s population would be 6.7 million by 2060. Though it was predicted in the late 19th century that London would soon be covered in horse manure…then along came the motorised car.
I agree - looking that far into the future is a fools game. Still though it is rather fascinating to project current trends into the future with a few assumptions and see what picture we get.
But the future has this nasty habit of throwing unknowns at us. Those looking at Ireland in the 50s must have predicted we’d drop to about 1 million by the millenium!