Ireland must take action to avoid a falling birthrate, a leading academic has said. 
Dr Margret Fine-Davis, Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Social Attitude and Policy Research Group at Trinity College, cited a prediction by the Central Statistics office that Ireland’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR) would reach the European average of 1.5 children per woman of childbearing age.
“This is significantly less than the population replacement level of 2.1,” she added.
Writing in today’s Irish Times, she also noted that several European countries, including Italy, Germany, Hungary and Poland, had lower rates of about 1.3, considered “lowest low” in demographic terms.
This was a problem, Dr Fine-Davis said, because “if we do not have enough children, we won’t have enough workers to pay for the health services and pensions which will be needed by our increasingly ageing population”.
“While Ireland is not faced with this problem now, it is likely to be an issue down the road and something we would be wise to consider now in terms of our social policies and our goals as a society,” she added.
Ireland’s TFR in the 1970s was four children per woman of childbearing age. Currently, it stands at 2.07.
Dr Fine-Davis said the falling birth rate was also “a symptom of other problems and issues revealed by research”.
She said: “People are experiencing constraints in family formation and these are leading to lesser wellbeing.
“Our recent study, Attitudes to Family Formation in Ireland , involving 1,400 men and women in the childbearing age group, revealed significant discrepancies between people’s “ideal”, “expected” and “actual” number of children.
“While on average people would ideally like to have 2.73 children, they only expect to have an average 2.41. Yet the actual number they are having is about two. A widening gap between desired and actual fertility is a phenomenon observed cross-culturally.
Ireland was also seeing an increase in the number of older single people and an increase in childless graduates, she said.
Dr Fine Davis said: “A stark finding from an analysis of the 2006 census data by Pete Lunn and Tony Fahey et al (2010) is that more than 50 per cent of female graduates of 32 are childless.”
Recent research she and her colleagues had conducted found that “single people have significantly lesser psychological wellbeing and greater social isolation than married and cohabiting people (with married people having the highest wellbeing) and single mothers are particularly at risk, as are well-educated older single women,” she noted.
She said: “Given the increase in the proportion of single people in the population – including an increase in single mothers, and in divorced and separated people – it is likely a greater proportion of our society will become vulnerable to poorer psychological wellbeing.
“Our society is changing from one previously richer in social networks, and is now characterised by greater social isolation and individualisation, particularly in urban areas. Relative psychological wellbeing should be of increasing concern to social policymakers.
“These findings underscore the need for social policy to address the dilemmas faced by young people who want to start families, while at the same time fulfilling their needs for autonomy and development.
She suggested that the lack of childcare was one of the obstacles to a higher birthrate
Ireland did not have the infrastructure “to provide the kind of childcare that helps support women’s employment and childbearing in countries such as France and Denmark – both of which have kept women’s employment high while maintaining a healthy birth rate”
Denmark’s TFR is 1.78 children per woman of childbearing age, while France’s is 2.01. Both are lower than Ireland’s TFR.
Sweden, which has practically universal access to childcare, also has a lower TFR (1.67 per woman of childbearing age) than that of Ireland.
