Westmeath bucks birth trend – just

Just 1.6 per cent of the births recorded in Ireland in 1959 were outside marriage; in 2021, 42 per cent of births occurred outside marriage/civil partnership.

The latest release of ‘Vital Statistics’ released by the Central Statistics Office also shows that over the last 12 years, there has been a significant fall in the birth rate in this country.

In both 1991 and 2001, there were 15 births per 1,000 population; in 1911 that rose to 16.2 births – but in 2021, the rate was just 11.9 per 1,000 population, although that is 0.5 higher than the corresponding birth rate in 2020, which was 11.4 per 1,000 of the population.

Westmeath did, however, somewhat buck the trend in 2021: with 1,231 babies born to mothers resident in the county, it had the fifth highest birth rate nationally – 13 babies born per 1,000 of population.

That said, on a regional level, the smallest number of births (3,832) was in the midland region (Laois, Longford, Offaly and Westmeath), at 6.3% of all births.

The figures show that the average age of the Westmeath-based women who gave birth in 2021 was 32.7 years. Those having their first babies averaged 30.6 years. First time mothers who were married were around five years older (average 33.1) than first time mothers who were not married (average 28.5).

Some 25 of the Westmeath mothers were aged under 20; 99 were aged between 20 and 24; 87 of the mothers were aged 40 or more.

Nationally the percentage of births to teenage mothers was 1.2% (710) of all births in 2021, compared to 2020, when it was 1.5% (857). This was the lowest percentage of births to mothers under 20 years since 1958, when it was 1.4% of all births. From 1959 on, the percentage of births to mothers in that age group continued to increase, until it reached a peak in 1999, when 6.2% (3,314) of all births were to mothers under 20. The percentage of mothers in that age group had continued to decrease each year since 1999, prior to a slight increase in 2020.

At the other end of the scale, the number of births to mothers aged 40 years and more is increasing. In 2021, there were 8.4% (or 5,101) of births to mothers aged 40 and more, an increase of 0.1% on 2020. In 1981, mothers under 30 years of age accounted for 59% of births. However, the proportion of births to that age group declined fairly steadily to reach 24.5% in 2021.

The number of maternities in 2021 which resulted in live births was 59,560 including 1,038 sets of twins and 16 sets of triplets. There were no sets of quadruplets. This is equivalent to a ‘twinning rate’ of 17.4 (i.e. the number of sets of live twins per 1,000 maternities which resulted in live births). Over the last 29 years, the twinning rate has increased significantly – from 11.7 in 1991, to an all-time high of 19.0 in 2016.

In 2021, Covid accounted for 54 deaths in Westmeath, the CSO figures reveal. In terms of suicides, there were nine deaths in Westmeath, seven male and two female.