In the nine-year period between 1994 and 2003 the number of marriages in our State increased by well over one-fifth, and the number of births by well over one-quarter. Since then, both figures have stabilised, as has the number of non-marital births, which until 2003 had been rising steadily.
But, surprisingly, neither the earlier dramatic increase in these basic demographic elements between 1994 and 2003 nor their subsequent stabilisation have attracted much public attention. Indeed, I suspect that most people are quite unaware of either of these phenomena.
The background to these recent developments has been a uniquely unstable Irish demography throughout the period since 1960 - with almost all the elements that contribute to our population (emigration, immigration, marriages, births to younger mothers and also to older mothers), changing direction - most of them three times! - within the past 50 years.
The scale of the changes in our demography brought about by these turnarounds have quite been dramatic.
For example, within little more than a decade after 1960 we had moved from being the European country with the highest net emigration rate to being a country with, for a decade, net immigration. And, more recently, we have moved within six years from recording the second-lowest marriage rate in western Europe to having one of the highest.
And, of course, between 1845 and 1960 we had moved from having one of the densest populations in Europe, matched only by Belgium and two Italian city states, to a situation where our density of population had become the lowest in Europe outside Scandinavia.
Looking back 45 years, we can see that the recovery in our economy after 1960 cut emigration to a fraction of its former level, with the result that within two decades the number of people aged under 27 had risen by a quite astonishing 70 per cent - and, with a rapidly-rising marriage rate in the earlier part of this period, the birth-rate for this young age group had almost doubled.
It is, of course, true that during the latter part of that 20-year period fertility had started to decline - but up to 1980 the impact of falling fertility had been more than offset by the huge increase in the number of young people forming families. The result was that despite falling fertility, the birth-rate rose by one-quarter to a level not recorded at any time in the previous century.
But during the 1970s the marriage-rate had started to level off, and after 1980 both marriages of young people in their 20s and births to them started to fall dramatically. By 1994, the number of married women under the age of 27 had dropped by almost 70 per cent, and births to married women in that age bracket had fallen even more than that.
Even if the greatly increased number of non-marital births are included in the total, the birth-rate for that age cohort had more than halved during this period.
But the 1990s saw a further swing of the demographic pendulum. For, as a new generation of largely unattached working women began to approach the age of 30, a "biological clock" factor emerged, which from early 1995 onwards began to yield a rise in the birth-rate. An increase in the marriage-rate for women over the age of 28 had also begun to appear, as a result of which from 1997 onwards the overall marriage-rate for all age groups had begun to rise.
Higher birth and marriage rates continued thereafter for some years, but in 2003 both stabilised and have since held constant - as, incidentally, has the non-marital proportion of births.
Nevertheless, as a result of what had happened between 1994 and 2003, the overall number of births is today almost 30 per cent higher than in the mid-1990s - which brings that total more than half way back to the peak level that had been attained in 1980.
In most of Europe during that recent period the birth-rate has continued to decline. Only in a small minority of European countries - France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Ireland - have increases in the birth-rate taken place since the mid-1990s.
And Ireland has had the largest increase, because in our case the impact of increased fertility among those over 30 has been reinforced by a significant increase in the total number of women of child-bearing age - which is now one-seventh higher than back in the mid-1990s.
In the early part of the present decade part of the increase in our birth-rate that was then taking place may have reflected a new practice of women coming to Ireland to have a baby here - a practice which until the Constitution and laws were changed in 2004 secured Irish citizenship for the child in question.
The recent stabilisation in the total number of births here may be explained by a fall-off in the number of such opportunistic non-national births following the changes in our Constitution and laws that eliminated this loop-hole to Irish citizenship. This decline may have obscured some recent continuing rise in the birth-rate of Irish nationals. An important factor influencing the drop in births that occurred between 1980 and 1994 had, of course, been the huge decline that took place during this period in the number of young married women.
For, although the total number of women aged 19 to 26 rose slightly during that period, the number of married women in this particular age bracket actually dropped by 63 per cent.
The consequent sharp increase in the number of single people in this younger age cohort had a very large impact on the number of children born, because, although there was a significant increase in non-marital births between 1980 and 1994, even at the end of this period the non-marital birth-rate for this age group was only one-seventh that for married women in that cohort.
Finally, it is worth pointing out that, contrary to a widely prevalent view, the proportion of non-marital births attributable to teenage girls is small - less than one-eighth of the total in 2003 - when the non-marital birth-rate for that age group of single women was just 1.5 per cent. By contrast, for single women in their 30s at that time, the non-marital birth-rate was almost 5 per cent.
This differential may, of course, be accounted for by a combination of a higher abortion rate among teenagers and a higher long-term cohabitation rate among single women over 30 - but we do not have data on these aspects of the matter.