PART 1: SOCIO-DEMOGRAPHICS

Child Mortality

A key target of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, as stated in Article 24, is that States Parties should aim to 'diminish infant and child mortality'.²

Measure

The proportion of deaths among children under 18.

Key findings

• The death rate of children aged under 18 years in Ireland was 5.1 deaths per 10,000 in 2002 (see Table 4). This rate had declined to 3.8 deaths per 10,000 in 2006.

Differences by gender and age

• Death rates are consistently higher for boys than for girls. In 2006, the death rate for boys was 4.4 per 10,000 compared to the death rate for girls of 3.1 per 10,000 (see Table 4).
• The majority of deaths of children occur in the period of infancy (aged less than one year). Infant deaths accounted for 238 of the total of 395 deaths of children under 18 in 2006 (see Table 5). This represented a death rate of 39 per 10,000 children aged less than one year, compared to an overall rate of 3.8 per 10,000 children under 18.
• The number of deaths of children in the age groups 1-4 and 15-17 were the highest after deaths in infancy.
• There has been a substantial decrease in infant mortality rates over the past 5 years. In 2002, the rate was 56 per 10,000; by 2006, it was 39 per 10,000.
• Overall, there has been a decrease in mortality rates among children aged 1-17 in the 5-year period 2002-2006.

Differences by cause

• The largest single cause of deaths of children under 18 in 2006 were deaths attributable to certain conditions in the perinatal period and congenital malformations, followed by injury and poisoning (see Table 6). In contrast, other conditions such as cancers are more prevalent among the causes of deaths of adults.

• More boys than girls died in each category according to cause of death (see Figure 2).This was particularly notable in the category 'injury and poisoning', where more than twice as many deaths were recorded for boys than for girls (41 compared with 17).

• In 2006, the infant mortality rate in Ireland was 3.7 per 1,000 live births (see Table 7).
• Among the EU27, Romania reported the highest infant mortality rate (13.9 per 1,000 live births), followed by Bulgaria (9.7 per 1,000 live births), while Luxembourg reported the lowest infant mortality rate (2.5 per 1,000 live births), followed by Sweden and Finland (each 2.8 per 1,000 live births).

• With a small number of exceptions, the mortality rate per 10,000 children in selected countries across the EU27 is higher for boys than for girls (see Table 8).
• Mortality rates are also substantially higher in the 0-4 age group than for any other age group. The data show that in 2005 Romania had the highest mortality rate for boys in the 0-4 age group (40.9 per 10,000) and Luxembourg had the lowest mortality rate (5.6 per 10,000).

Technical notes
Deaths are coded according to the 9th Revision of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases, Injuries and Causes of Death. Stillborn babies are excluded from infant mortality figures, which refer to deaths of children aged less than one year. The mortality figures refer to crude death rates and are classified by year of registration.

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