A leading academic has associated pro-natal policies with authoritarian and totalitarian regimes.

Writing on the RTE website, Prof Mary P Corcoran, acknowledges that there is a looming birth crisis both in Ireland and around the world so that countries will no longer replace themselves, and a diminishing number of young people will have to take care of an ever growing elderly population.

After briefly considering immigration as a solution, the Professor of Sociology at Maynooth University then turns to policies that foster the birth rate. Calling it a “more controversial solution”, she says: “History teaches us that pro-natalist policies often have the effect of weaponising childbearing for political ends”. She then name checks Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Nazi Germany, and Ceausescu’s Romania as examples.

As contemporary examples, she offers Turkey and Hungary.