Press Statement

Preasráiteas

31 October 2018

The number of births continues to fall with a 15.1% decrease on 2010 figures

Go to release: Vital Statistics Annual Report 2016

The CSO today (31 October 2018) released the Vital Statistics Annual Report 2016. Commenting on the report, Carol Anne Hennessy, statistician said: “The number of births has fallen by 15.1% since 2010 and 2.6% since 2015. There were 63,841 live births in Ireland in 2016 with 32,709 males and 31,132 females. The 2016 total is 2.4% lower than 10 years previously (2006) when there were 65,425 live births.

The average age of mothers for births that occurred in 2016 was 32.7 years. Mothers under 30 accounted for 27.7% of births in 2016, compared with ten years previously (2006), when mothers under 30 accounted for 39.5% of births. There were 1,101 births to mothers under 20 years in 2016, down from 2,335 in 2006, a decrease of 52.8%.

Over one in three (36.6%) of all births were outside of marriage/civil partnership in 2016. The comparable figure, 30 years earlier, in 1986 was 9.6%.

Over the past 25 years, the twinning rate has increased significantly, from a low of 11.7 in 1991 to a high of 19.0 in 2016. In 2016, the number of multiple live births was 1,215, consisting of 1,189 sets of twins, 24 sets of triplets and 2 sets of quadruplets.

There were 30,667 deaths in Ireland in 2016, an increase of 540 on the 2015 figure. Diseases of the circulatory system accounted for 9,237 or 30.1% of deaths and 9,171 or 29.9% of deaths were attributed to malignant neoplasms, while deaths from diseases of the respiratory system numbered 3,935 or 12.8% of all deaths.

Over 1.4% (437) of all deaths were due to suicide in 2016, 80.1% (350) of which were male.

There were 194 deaths of infants aged less than one year in 2016 giving an infant mortality rate of 3.0 deaths per 1,000 live births compared with 3.4 in 2015.  Over a third (37.6%) of all infant deaths occurred within the first day of birth while 59.8% occurred within the first week.

Congenital malformations, deformations and chromosomal abnormalities accounted for 39.7% of infant deaths while certain conditions originating in the perinatal period accounted for 44.8% of infant deaths in 2016.

Neonatal deaths are deaths of infants at ages under 4 weeks. There were 147 neonatal deaths registered in 2016, a neonatal mortality rate of 2.3 deaths per 1,000 live births.

The natural increase (births minus deaths) in 2016 was 33,174, a decrease of 6.3% on the 2015 figure. The natural increase 10 years previously in 2006 was 36,937, over 11.3% more than the 2016 figure.”

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