In Politics by Numbers, broadcaster, author and spreadsheet stan Gavan Reilly takes a data deep dive into a political point of the week. 

“WELCOME BACK TO day six of our coverage of Election 2049. Let’s go straight to the National Basketball Arena in Tallaght, and the count in Dublin South West, where the marathon count to fill the ninth and tenth seats is nearing completion…”

Does that sound a bit mad to you? An election count going into a sixth day, with exhausted staff filing through papers trying to decide who fills the tenth and final seat in a single constituency? It might sound far-fetched, but it’s not all that wild a proposal.

It’s all down to population, which seems to be increasing a little faster than the most assertive projections.

Last week the CSO released its latest estimates for the population of our state, outlining that 5,525,600 people lived in the Republic in April of this year. That’s a fairly steep increase: the last Census, only four years ago, put the population at 5.15 million. The population has thus risen by 7.3% in just four years.

Granted, the war in Ukraine created a particular spike in immigration just after the Census was taken, but the scale of increase is still unusual for a developed Western country. Go one census further back, to 2016, and the increase in 10 years is 16% – with over 750,000 more people now calling the State home than 10 years ago.

Doing a bit of backwards sums, you realise that this averages out to an increase of about 1.5% in the population every year – a combination of births, deaths, emigration and immigration. Simply extrapolate the same growth rate to the year 2049, and by the time Ireland marks the centenary of declaring its Republichood, the State would be........

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