Is Ireland full?

 

When is a country full?  Does it depend on physical space, wealth, income, political will, cultural openness or something else?  Is there a fixed law or norm determining fullness?  Can we ‘afford’ another 10%, 20% or more of population?  And what is ‘affordability’ dependent on? The answer is in how we arrange our institutions and society and how we govern ourselves. Migration is all about people - those on the move and those in the host nation.   People generate demand but they also generate supply.  Skilled nurses, building workers, service workers, mothers, fathers and students create value – economically, socially and culturally.  If public services such as housing, health and education are constrained then either we are not paying enough taxes, or we do not have enough tax-payers (and that could include tax-paying migrants), or we are not spending our taxes wisely and to best effect. 

Malthus was wrong about the limits of population and Marx was wrong about the demise of capitalism. And many of us, including the author of this blog, may be wrong about the future.  We can only know the evidence, learn from history and move forward while being open to correction.  Rapidly, Ireland went from being a poor outlier in Europe 50 years ago to the Switzerland of the North with super high productivity, living standards and trade openness notwithstanding serious gaps in public services and infrastructure. Along with social transformations and the welcome influx of returning Irish and the arrival of new Irish we have become a destination of choice and the land of céad mile fáilte (and hundred thousand welcomes) or so we thought until relatively recently.

Where is the idea of ‘fullness’ coming from?  It is as much about our lack of capacity due to under-investment in infrastructure and social capital as it is about fast population growth in the last decade thanks in part to inward migration.  Economic development over 1990-2023 was driven by many factors including inward investment and inward migration.  Rising living standards and job opportunities attracted large numbers to our shores.  Yet, our economic model has not served us well especially in regards to housing where a dysfunctional banking and property sector inflicted long-term harm on the supply of affordable and sufficient housing to match rising population.

The ’fullness’ of Ireland may be approached on a number of fronts specially those where we are seen to be under pressure such as in healthcare, housing and education.  But, first, lets look at population density since we know that Ireland supported a much larger population on the island in the 1840s.  Was Ireland 'full' in 1849?  Presumably yes in the opinion of the guardians of the peace in Delphi, County Mayo when upon rising from lunch turned back a crowd of children, women and men exhausted and starving.  Some of them perished on the mountains and in the valleys of South-West County Mayo.  Today, over 1,000 men are freezing on the streets of Dublin in tents not, we are told by the Taoiseach, because the Government seeks to deter new arrivals but because 'there is no accommodation'. This is another way of saying that 'Ireland is full'.  If we doubt that Ireland was full in 1849 we may seriously question whether it is full today especially when Ireland - one of the wealthiest nations in the European Union by any standard of GDP, GNI or alternative measures - has a relatively small population for the size of the Republic of Ireland (Figure 1).

Readers familiar with Ireland will know that we have been experiencing a severe housing shortage. The reasons are manifold but ultimately come back to systematic under-investment by the State in public housing for at least 40 years.

Housing (percentage of vacant property)

Comparable data on vacant residential property at EU level are not to hand. However, we know from data published by the CSO that, in April 2022, there were 198,227 vacant homes that were not holiday homes (refer to the online database for Profile 2 of the published CSO Census of Population for  2022). These accounted for 9.4% of total habitable housing stock at that time.  In other words, for every homeless child, woman and man in Ireland, there were 14 vacant and habitable houses that were not holiday homes. These numbers do not include dwellings that had become derelict.

Healthcare

To what extent might population increases including that triggered by migration lead to pressure on our health services? This is a complicated matter and is related to patterns of care, population age-structure in the first place and overall levels of health. We are all too familiar with the reality of long waiting times for diagnosis and treatment, the absence of key specialists and physicians especially in areas such as mental health, children with special needs and other areas.  However, on a primitive comparison by numbers of inhabitants per physician or by available hospital beds, Ireland was by no means top of the league for EU States in 2021 (Figures 2 and 3).  There is huge room for improvement in regards to service provision as well as primary healthcare in the community.  However, it is not obvious that Ireland has suffered undue pressure because of inward migration. Indeed, the provision of acute healthcare in Ireland would not be possible at current levels were not for a very substantial proportion of healthcare staff coming from outside the country.  The migrant population, here, are disproportionately young to middle-age adults in employment and who are surely contributing services, spending and taxes the value of which well exceeds their draw on public health services.

Education 

Pressure on school places into the future is indicated by projected numbers of pupils/students at first and second level. The most recent data published by the Department of Education in Ireland dates from November 2021. On the assumption of a modest flow of inward migration (M1) and a stagnant fertility rate of 1.6 children (F2) it is expected that enrolments at primary level will continue to fall for the foreseeable future with a projected fall of 90,000 pupils over a ten year period to 2033.  At second level, the expected fall is in the order of 50,000 over the same period. Given the likelihood of a substantial fall in pupil numbers across the country over a ten-year period there is plenty of scope for inward migration to bolster pupil numbers and keep schools open in many areas as well as retain classes and teachers. 

Where does Ireland stand in relation to its share of migrant population? 

 We are close to the European Union average. 13.2% of the population, in the Republic of Ireland in 2022, were not Irish citizens (Figure 4). Of these, 7.0% were EU non-Irish citizens. This compares with a foreign citizen EU population of 3.1% for the EU as whole and 5.3% for non-EU foreign citizens for the EU as whole. Therefore, the main difference in foreign population proportions for Ireland lies in EU foreign citizens living here (accounting for an excess of 3.9% of the population = 7.0-3.1). In the main these are the workers who migrated here in the early noughties following the accession of new Member States from the East.  Generally, these have settled well in Ireland and have made a huge positive contribution economically, socially and culturally. It should be noted that the surge in immigration from Ukraine arising from the war in 2022- is not picked up by these data as they refer to 1 January 2022.  In a future blog I will examine recent trends in migration of refugees from Ukraine since the onset of war.

 The key difference between Ireland and the rest of the EU in terms of foreign citizen population, at least up to the end of 2021, has been linked to the particularly high inflows of immigrants from other EU Member States especially following the accession of new States to membership of the EU in 2004 and then in 2007. 

 In short, Ireland is not full. Rather, it is capacity constrained because of poor public policy making in recent decades. That a surge in inward migration following Covid and the outbreak of war in Europe has added to demands for accommodation and services not only in Ireland but across most of Europe is not surprising. Neither is the rise in tensions, anxiety and the stoking of fears by certain political forces and ideologies across Europe. Clearly, Europe as a whole and Ireland in particular is under sudden and sustained pressure as a result of inward migration some of which is associated with the situation in the Ukraine.  However, EU Member States differ in regards to how they handle inward migration and address additional population.

 In the next blog, I will examine the claim that inward migration is 'out of control'.  Stay tuned.