The data released by the Central Statistics Office (CSO), says that the number of registered births has fallen when compared to the previous years.
This is because the births are registered less and the findings record a slight increase in the registered deaths resulted in the fall down of the natural increase in population.
The CSO’s data doesn’t include any of the Covid related deaths, so the inclusion of the Covid related deaths could pull down the graph even down.
It was in the month of April that the CSO confirmed the very first Covid death, at that time itself they registered it and confirmed that the impact of Covid-19 won’t be reflected on the second quarterly figures.
The lowest quarterly natural increase over the past five years was recorded from January, 2020 to March 2020. During these months 14,371 births were registered against 8,674 deaths and this led to a natural increase in population of 5,697 people and that was the lowest to be recorded.
11% of birth was registered from the Dublin city (1,585 people) and Cork was the second with 9% of birth percentage (1,270). County Leitrim recorded the lowest number of birth in the first quarter with less that 1% of all births.
The majority (77%) of mothers identified as Irish, while 12% came from the European Union, 2% from the UK, and 9% identified as other nationalities.
The CSO data also displays that 35 teenagers aged between 16 and 17 years became new mums, with one 17-year-old having a second child.
About the Deaths
In between the first three months of the year, 42 infants were recorded as dead and out of which 31 occurred before they were four weeks old.
The neonatal and infant mortality rates for 1000 live births were 2.2 and 2.9 respectively, which represents a falling trend since the initial months of 2018. The stats of the neonatal and infant mortality rates during 2018 were 2.8 and 3.5 per 1000 births.
Considering all age groups, the number of deaths was up by 56 in the initial quarter compared to the previous period of 2019. Cancer and circulatory diseases took away 58% of lives across all the age groups whereas respiratory illness accounted death for 15%.
Cancer was the leading cause of death for people aged 35-74 years, and people over the age of 75 mostly lost their lives because of heart disease and other diseases of the circulatory system.
Accidents, suicides and other factors took away 41 lives from amongst people of 15-34 years of age.
In total 72 suicides were recorded across all age groups between January and March.
Another factor that pulls down the birth percentage was same sex marriages. A total of 115 marriages out of 2,886 which happened in the first quarter were same-sex nuptials.