Louth registered 386 births in the last quarter

There were 386 births in Louth in the last quarter of 2023 according to provisional statistics released by The Central Statistics Office.

There were 210 boys born and 176 girls. 

The average age of first time mothers in the county in the 4th quarter was 32.5 compared with a national average of 33.3.

According to the Vital Statistics Fourth Quarter 2023 release, almost half, 177, of those babies were born to people outside of marriage or civil partnership (45.9%), whereas 209 were born within marriage. 

The statistics released today also show the provisional number of deaths of residents in Louth. 

Between October and December, 207 people in Louth died. 

Of those, 100 were male and 107 female. 

The biggest cause of death was cancer (68),followed by circulatory disease (45), Diseases of the Respiratory system (25) and external causes (12).

57 deaths came under the category of ‘All Other Causes’ in the fourth quarter of 2023. 

Nationally, The number of births increased by 546 or 4.2% in Quarter 4 (Q4) 2023 to 13,415 registrations. There were 8,186 deaths registered in the same period, which was 37 more deaths (0.5%) when compared with the same period in 2022. Care should be taken when interpreting these figures. (See Statistician's Comment below for more detail).

There were 145 deaths due to COVID-19 in Q4 2023, accounting for 1.8% of deaths in the quarter of which 78 were male and 67 were female.

Cancer and circulatory disease were the biggest causes of death in Ireland in Q4 2023 accounting for 4,624 (or 56.5%) of deaths compared with 4,599 (or 56.4%) in Q4 2022.

The average age of all mothers in Q4 2023 was 33.3 years, up slightly from 33.2 years recorded in Q4 2022. The average age of all mothers 10 years ago was 32.2 years for the same quarter.

Just under two in five (39.4%) births were outside marriage/civil partnership in Q4 2023.

The natural increase (i.e. births minus deaths) grew by 10.8% in Q4 2023 compared with the same period in 2022.