An important new study explores the causes of falling birth rates and unsurprisingly finds multiple causes but with the decline of marriage and intimate relationships playing a big part. The author, Tomáš Sobotka, is deputy director of the Vienna Institute of Demography and an internationally recognised expert on fertility and family change. He describes the...
In computer game parlance there are ‘player characters’ and ‘non-player-characters’. The former are controlled by the humans playing the game, and the latter by the computer itself. The NPCs, in other words, do not control themselves. The terminology easily translates into politics. There are government ministers who are player characters and ones who are NPCs....
In 2025, there were 1.35 million more deaths than births in the EU. Despite this, the population has increased slightly but that is only because of immigration. That is according to the latest annual demographics report from the EU’s official statistic agency, Eurostat. Eurostat figures show that births in 2025 were down a fifth compared...
A senior German politician has been forced to resign after entering into a commercial surrogacy arrangement in the United States. In Ireland, he would probably be given a soft interview on The Late Late Show for doing the same thing, because our attitude to surrogacy is probably the most liberal in Europe. The politician, Jens...
Family stability should be recognised as a core component of any child poverty strategy, according to a new report from the UK Centre for Social Justice. The reason? Stable relationships provide a platform for economic progress. Governments usually approach child poverty as a problem of insufficient income, the report by Dr Harry Benson argues. The...
Tomorrow marks the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence which includes the famous words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But are these “truths”...
The latest Rotunda Hospital annual report contains a deeply troubling finding: three-quarters of babies found to have Down Syndrome via a prenatal test are aborted. This is obviously modern-day eugenics. The report shows that in 2024, the hospital’s Fetal Medicine Department diagnosed 45 unborn babies with Trisomy 21, better known as Down Syndrome, and 32...
When issues like abortion or euthanasia are debated, opponents issue warnings about the ‘slippery slope’ and predict that the ‘floodgates will open’. By this they mean that after either one is introduced, the grounds for it will expand, and the numbers availing of it will increase. Proponents deny either of these things will happen. For...
In many parts of the world today, people are having few children than they want. A new report from Canada confirms this phenomenon. A report from The Iona Institute last week predicts that one in four members of Gen Z will never have a child. An Amarach poll we commissioned finds that average person still...
One in four members of ‘Gen Z’ look set never to have children, a new paper from the Iona Institute forecasts. The paper is called ‘Choice or Circumstance? Rising Childlessness in Ireland’. The document examines trends in childlessness by generation starting with women born in 1955 (the ‘baby boomers’). It finds that only 13.5pc of...
