The number of births in Clare has dropped by more than 20 percent in the last decade.
1,309 babies were born in this county last year, compared to nearly 1,700 in 2010.
The number of babies born in Clare has been slowly falling throughout the past decade, with a high of 1,900 newborns here back in 2009.
That fell gradually to the lowest number since records began in 2020, though it’s just ten fewer than 2019’s number.
The number of women in their twenties having babies in this county has dropped by nearly half in the past decade.
523 babies were born to mothers aged between 20 and 29 in 2010, but that felt to 284 through all of last year.
The number of babies born to mothers under the age of 20 has also dropped by more than half – it stood at 54 ten years ago here in Clare, and was 21 last year.
The CSO figures do appear to show that the average age of mothers here is getting older – 92 babies were born to mums over the age of 40 in 2010, and that number increased to 116 in 2020 despite the sharp fall in the number of overall births.
Babies are still being predominantly born to mothers in their thirties – as was the case in more than two thirds of births in this county last year.
