Fergus Finlay: Population growth shows many wish to be part of our ‘little’ country 

“Once upon a time there were two Chinese.” (Pregnant pause.) “And would you just look at how many there are now!” (Cue raucous laughter.) The year I was born there were 2,960,593 of us (Irish, that is, not Chinese). And would you just look at how many of us there are now.

They started counting our population in 1841. There were 6.5m of us then. In the first decade of that counting, we lost 1.5m people, through starvation, disease, poverty, and emigration. 

Poverty and emigration became the key factors in determining the number of Irish people who could live in Ireland and support themselves for the next century and a bit. It went down and down and down, and it wasn’t until 1979 that our population again passed 3m.

But in the last 20 years we’ve added more than 1m people and have gone past 5m. Isn’t that incredibly exciting? And isn’t it an amazing comment about how our country has changed?

For the great bulk of the last century — from the moment our State was founded — Ireland was a country that people had to leave. For all of this century, Ireland is a country that people want to come to.

And they don’t just want to come here, they want to be part of us. The biggest single change I could find in the Census figures was the number of people who want to add Irish citizenship to their own.

Some 170,000 extra people in the population are now dual citizens. We might have Brexit to thank for some of that, if you count the significant number of British-born people who have taken out Irish citizenship since the last Census.

That’s only a tiny part of the story. Our population is rising rapidly for three broad reasons. Many are coming home, some are coming to find safety and sanctuary here, some want to make a fresh start. All of them have talents and ambition and potentially an amazing contribution to make.

Increase in average age

In recent days, I’ve listened to a lot of scary news about how our population is ageing and about the pensions timebomb that represents. 

Soon, it seems, there won’t be enough young people at work to support the older people retiring.

You’d be tempted to say, “So what else is new? When were we ever able (or willing) to guarantee that old age would always be accompanied by dignity and respect?” I can remember a time when old men in county homes were supplied with one clean shirt a week, when they slept in dormitories, when they queued up in the mornings to have loose cigarettes doled out to them.

That was public provision back then — and I’m not talking about pre-Civil War times in Ireland. Colour television was introduced here in the early 1970s — but people who depended on the State lived utterly grey lives until long after that. I worked in some of those homes, and I can remember the grimness of it.

But you can also look at it a different way: A growing population is actually one of the best pre-conditions for a growing and stable economy. When our population was only 70% of what it is now, in 1991, the unemployment rate was one in six of our people. Now we have full employment. 

Since the last Census alone, the number of people at work has gone up by 16% and it’s higher than it has ever been in our history.

Of course, there’s no direct or automatic correlation — no one can argue that the bigger the population, the lower unemployment will be. 

But what today’s figures show is that we can find a place for everyone in the world of work. 

It’s possible. And if that’s possible, so is it also possible to build a decent set of securities for the future. We just have to set our minds to it.

In all sorts of other ways, we’re pretty much the same as we’ve always been. For sure, we seem to be losing our religion, bit by bit, and we all know the reasons for that. But we’re still, for example, pretty committed to marriage. Six per cent of people in the Census reported themselves as divorced or separated.

Every time I see figures like that, I remember the campaigns that told us that if we removed the constitutional ban of divorce in Ireland it would be “Hello divorce, bye bye Daddy”.

The most popular recurring phrase throughout those campaigns was that “the floodgates would open”. They said it about gay marriage too, of course. They even said that any measure that advanced the rights of children would undermine the fabric of marriage and society. Hopefully next time they try that rubbish, we can all point to the Census.

Perhaps though the floodgates have opened in other ways. We are a much more diverse place now than when we were younger. I was 16, on a visit to London, before I saw my first black face. 

When I was in school it was commonplace to mock and jeer — and worse — anyone you “suspected” of being gay. And it is sadly still the case in Ireland that we haven’t fully gotten over all the prejudices of the past. We’re still capable of hate.

Enhancing our culture

But we’re getting there. Diversity means all sorts of different things after all. I live in a village in Dublin where we can walk to buy Indian, Chinese, Thai, and Indonesian food (as well as some of the best pizzas around!). 

It’s only one of the ways in which the arrival of foreign cultures has enriched our lives. Sport is another — one of the great joys in life is watching your country do well on the playing field, and our heroes no longer have to have red hair and freckles (nothing wrong with red hair and freckles, of course!).

Here’s the thing: I grew up in a country that was dark and often miserable. 

I never wanted to leave, but most of my family did, and they didn’t all come back. We wouldn’t have grown as rapidly as we have if we hadn’t changed — pretty well from the ground up.

Next week I’ll probably be angry again about how we’ve let people down in one or other aspect of our public policy. But right now we need to celebrate — how many of us there are, who we are and who we have become, where we’ve come from, and where we can go. 

We used to think of ourselves as a great little country. We’re still great. Just not so little any more.