Miriam O’Callaghan: ‘ There’s too much bad news about having babies’

RTÉ’s new documentary, Ireland’s Population Crash, opens with a stark statistic. It tells viewers that in just one decade, Ireland’s birth rate has fallen by a staggering 30 per cent.

It’s a fact that is worrying economists and demographers, who warn that if the trend continues, it could threaten Ireland’s future workforce and place untold financial strain on the State pension system.

Presented by veteran broadcaster Miriam O’Callaghan, the two-part documentary explores the multitude of reasons behind this downward trajectory and examines what Ireland’s future will look like with fewer children.

“If you want to have a child, or if you don’t want to have a child, that’s completely your right. The only problem is, what will happen to the world if no one has children?” O’Callaghan asks in episode one.

Before the documentary grapples with this question of a “world without children”, it analyses how childcare costs and unaffordable housing are affecting young people’s decisions around parenthood.

“ If you don’t have a home, the last thing you’re probably thinking of is having a baby. People say, ‘I can’t bring a child into the world. I have nowhere to bring it. I’m not going to bring it into my parent’s’ spare bedroom’,” O’Callaghan tells the latest episode of The Irish Times Women’s Podcast.

But it’s not just “financial issues” that are stopping people from having children, the mother of eight says. Discourse on social media, she adds, is also influencing decisions around parenthood.

“There’s too much bad news about having babies,” O’Callaghan tells podcast presenter Róisín Ingle." If you look at TikTok and Insta, it’s all about how difficult it is and I think it’s such a wondrous gift”.

“My only success really, I think - and I love my career and I love what I do - is that I have eight healthy, happy children, and I wake up grateful for that every day”.

To highlight how falling birth rates could affect Irish society in future, O’Callaghan travels to South Korea, where the fertility rate stands at 0.8 births per woman and the effects of the declining population can already be felt.

“Two things I thought were really shocking is that there are more nappies sold for adults in South Korea than there are nappies sold for babies and there are more baby buggies sold for dogs,” she says.

Although South Korea’s birth rate has risen slightly in recent years, it is still significantly below the population replacement level of 2.1 births per woman, a threshold the country has not met since 1983.

“ They have the lowest birth rate on the planet, and they have older people with robots because there are no young people to be friendly to them, or they didn’t have children, so there’s no one to mind them”.

“I wouldn’t want to live in a world like that. I didn’t see a single child when I was in South Korea,” she adds.

You can listen back to this conversation in the player above or search The Women’s Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

The first episode of Ireland’s Population Crash is available to watch on RTE1 on Wednesday November 4th at 9:35pm, followed by episode two on November 11th.