The CSO has issued a report today called ‘Measuring Ireland’s Progress’. It is full of detail on a whole range of issues from unemployment to the environment. Here are just a few things that struck me after a quick read of it, but to summarise; Sweden at first glance appears to be very sexist, but isn’t, and marriage is environmentally friendly.
To begin with, the report confirms once again how young our population remains compared with most other EU countries. Only 15.9 per cent of our population is over 65. The average in the EU 27 is 25.2 per cent. In Germany and Italy it is more than 30 per cent!
Thirty per cent of Irish people are aged 0-14. The EU average is 23.5 per cent. In the Czech Republic the figure is only 20 per cent. Overall in the EU there are more people over 65 than under 15. That does not bode well for the future.
Needless to say, fertility rates in most EU countries are well below the replacement rate and in no EU country is it at or above the replacement level of 2.1 children per couple. The EU average is a mere 1.53 which is suicidally low.
We also find that more and more people in Ireland are living alone which is partly a function of childlessness. The number of one person households in Ireland has increased from 276,800 in 1999 to 338,300 last year. Overall the average number of people per household is down from 2.98 in 1999 to 2.79 in 2008.
This is a figure environmentalists ought to pay a lot more attention to. The more people there are per household, the fewer houses there will be. The fewer houses there are, the lower carbon emissions will be.
The best way to increase the number of people per household is to promote marriage. Alas, the Irish Greens are not about to do that anytime soon even though the family based-on-marriage is the most environmentally friendly of all families.
Finally, the gender pay gap is Ireland is fairly large and falls somewhere in the middle in EU terms at 17 per cent. Curiously, Italy, Malta, Poland and Portugal have the smallest pay gaps even though these would be fairly traditional societies while egalitarian Sweden has a pay gap of 18 per cent and Holland of 24 per cent.
No-one would ever suggest that Sweden is a sexist country, so what is going on? Maybe many Swedish women are happy to work in lower-paid jobs, or else work part-time, because it suits them. Sometimes the pay gap is the result of women’s choices, not discrimination. Sweden seems to prove that.