For more than 70 years, Geert Adriaans Boomgaard, a soldier in Napoleon’s army, held the record for the longest-lived person in Europe. He was one of only 10 people in Europe to reach 100 at that time. He died shortly before his 111th birthday. In contrast, there will be close to half a million centenarians in the EU by 2050. This is a good illustration of how quickly our world is ageing. Overall, we continue to live longer by 2.2 years for every decade since the 1800s. In other words, in the 1900s when Geert was at the end of his life, one could expect to live, on average, to 55 years. Today in Ireland, one can expect to live to one’s mid-80s – and Ireland is one of the fastest-ageing countries in Europe.

At the same time as we are ageing as a country, our birth rates are dropping dramatically. A helpful statistic is the replacement level of births. This represents the number of births needed to compensate for deaths, and keep the balance of young and old. But our birth rates are below this replacement level. The replacement rate is 2.2 and our birth rate is 1.5. One hundred years ago, it was over four children per woman. This doesn’t just apply to Ireland – it is the case right across Europe.

So, on the one hand we are living longer and at the same time the numbers of young people are declining. This is what is meant by an ageing society. To grow old in an ageing society is fundamentally very different from growing old in a young society.

A substantial challenge is how best to accommodate this remarkable demographic shift when most of our government policies, infrastructures, societal norms and institutions were built when the structure of society was very different, and the number of older people was significantly lower than today.

In........

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