Government policy has not managed the population boom well, writes Marc Coleman, Economics Editor.
The latest census shows that Ireland is embarked on a journey back to the future. In the century and a half since the Famine our population experienced a historical U-turn. Falling to a trough in the first hundred years of this period, it began to rise again in the early 1960s.
By 1986, 3.5 million people lived in the State, the same number that lived in what is now the Republic as recorded in the census of 1891. In 1996 that had risen, but only just, to 3.6 million. By crude extrapolation from the 1891 census, that is the same number as in 1890. Yesterday's census shows that we have now fully achieved the U-turn. Between 1996 and 2002 the population jumped from 3.6 million to 3.9 million, bringing us back in time, in population terms, to 1881.
The latest census for this year is even more amazing. From 3.9 million in 2002, our population has now jumped to 4.2 million, bringing us in one step back 20 years, to 1861.
In the last four years alone, the State's population has risen by 317,000 persons, more than the present populations of Cavan, Monaghan and Donegal put together. The rate of growth, 2 per cent per annum, is the highest in recorded history. It compares with annual growth of 1.3 per cent in the period between 1996 and 2002.
How have Government policies contributed to this amazing change? How are they coping with it? The last two census periods coincide broadly with the Celtic Tiger. While economic growth in the mid to late 1990s was stronger than now, there was less employment. Since then, lower taxes and - since EMU - lower interest rates have made growth friendlier towards job creation.
Another crucial policy factor relates to our decision to join Sweden and the UK in allowing workers from the accession states to work in Ireland without permits, the only three original EU states to do so. Of the 317,000 more persons in Ireland now compared to 2002, 131,000 were born here and 186,000 have come here from abroad.
But while Government policy has succeeded famously in creating the population boom, it has had less success in managing its consequences, and the composition of immigration provides the best evidence of this. A million Irish citizens were born in Ireland in the years preceding the boom, but emigrated for want of work or opportunity. Despite this, a majority of new arrivals are from poorer countries.
The Wild Geese are less likely to return to an overpriced and congested country. Indeed, despite rising prosperity, there is now credible anecdotal evidence of Irish people leaving Ireland out of an inability to afford housing: the latest census figures are entirely consistent with the thesis that high property prices, spatial imbalance, poor urban planning and underdeveloped transport infrastructures form a nexus of policy failure, to which all parties have contributed.
In 1994 the Economic and Social Research Institute predicted, with amazing accuracy, the coming boom. Globalisation was in full swing by then and the euro - and lower interest rates - were known as certain future events. And yet a half decade passed before a National Development Plan (NDP) or a National Spatial Strategy (NSS). The mid-1990s were crucial lost years in that respect.
More recent governments are not exempt from blame. As the preliminary census figures for 2002 to 2006 indicate, the NDP and NSS have been less than totally successful: the imbalance of population between the east and west of the country remains chronic, as does the inefficiency of its urban concentration.
Of the 4,234,925 persons recorded as living in the State last April over half - some 2,292,939 - inhabit barely more than a quarter of its land mass. Population is rising faster in Leinster than any other province. In Connacht, Ulster and Munster population levels are indeed rising, but by slower rates than Leinster.
To correct regional imbalance, growth rates in these western and northern regions need to be faster, much faster, than in Leinster.
As a report by Forfás on manufacturing and traded services, published yesterday reveals, regional trends in jobs growth are reinforcing east/west imbalance. Some 67 per cent of new jobs in the crucial traded services sector were created in the Dublin area.
And whether in the east or in the west, population growth has a spray gun quality to it. The preliminary census contains two maps of population growth that say it all: one for the nation as a whole and the other for Dublin. Showing areas with highest rates of population growth in darker shades, it makes Ireland look like a country suffering an outbreak of German measles, with hundreds of small towns growing rapidly. Dublin looks like a doughnut, with little population growth in commutable distance of the city centre and much growth in a ring around the edge: once rural Balbriggan's population is growing by 114 per cent, according to the census. In more commutable Crumlin, it is actually falling.
The resulting spatial sprawl has permanently handicapped our options as regards transport. A desirable transport strategy would look like the spokes of a bicycle - thick bold straight lines radiating out from Dublin to regional centres. Inter-city rail is a fast, cheap and fuel-efficient mode of transport which reduces traffic congestion and parking problems.
For it to be viable, it needs population to be concentrated in well-planned towns. Our present dysfunctional pattern of population growth will dictate a spider's web approach. Inter-city rail is practically absent from the Government's transport policies which regard the car as king.
With more and smaller towns, more roads must be built to connect them, meaning more expense, more delay and longer commuting times to the larger population centres which are creating jobs.
This ought to be worrying. An earlier Forfás report, on oil dependency, showed that thanks to our dependence on cars - and in spite of lower car ownership rates - Ireland is now one of the world's most oil-dependent countries.
As the bombs fall on northern Israel and Lebanon and as the oil price rises, we need to start thinking about the kind of future we are going back to.