Excess Deaths in Ireland – Misinformation Campaign (Wrong thinking from the Right)

So, some of you may have noticed the angriest chunk of Ireland's perpetually online cohort are regularly sharing a graph showing an increase in the number of deaths in Ireland from 30k in 2015 growing to 37k in 2023 (example attached on pic 2) and thus claiming there's been 21k excess deaths in Ireland that's being kept hidden and in fact, they're claiming it's being hidden because the cause of excess deaths is from the Covid Vaccine.

Their source of the claim is generally coming from an accountant in Kilkenny who has spoken at a bunch of Independent Ireland and far right events (John Waters etc, you know who I mean). He has a website where he tracks RIP dot ie posts and then classes all deaths above the 2017 figure as "excess"…

Now to anyone with a background in statistical analysis, you'd correctly ask – wait, hasn't the population and life expectancy been growing for decades, so isn't it likely that the entire increase in deaths is in line with demographics? You would be correct. Any college course statistics student would have been able, in 2016, to forecast the expected number of deaths in 2023 to reach 37k. In fact, if a stats student was tasked with calculating excess deaths wouldn't get a passing grade if they classed all increases as excess – they'd probably get advised to change course/major. Pic 3 shows a rough way of showing how logical a 7k increase in deaths is based on our demographics.

The second claim is that young people are dying suddenly at a massive rate. This one you'll see all over FB comment sections and X etc. Their evidence has two sources:

1. "Look at how many young people death notices we are sharing" – I spotted one of these this week with hundreds of likes and a comment section filled with screenshots of RIP posts.
   1. Firstly, the fella in question they'd posted about was a semi famous chap who died almost two years ago and a quick google shows his family organised a charity match in his honour with proceeds going to HUGG (family bereavement support group if they've taken their own lives). There were a hundred comments blaming the covid vaccine. Well, there were a hundred comments, could be more now – I pointed out articles showing he'd died at his own hands so the poster blocked me…
   2. They don't care what the cause is, they just share all young people RIP posts and say, look, you don't remember seeing so many posts like these in the past, so now you're seeing loads of them, therefore more young people are dying.
2. Their "accountant" has been claiming a 60%+ increase in young, unexplained deaths and they all just take his word for it and repeat the claim.

In an interview at one of those events, he was asked if population changes might explain the changes – his response was he doesn't think so, but he hasn't looked into it. (I know he's not a statistician, but that's an insultingly dumb response for an accountant too).

So I did. In 2016, we had 848k people aged 15-24, but by 2024, that number was over a million thanks to the baby boo we had in the 2000s. We've seen a 20% increase deaths, alongside a 20% increase in the number of people that age. So I graphed the 15-24 death rate per 100k and sure enough, per the attached graph, we are seeing a slowly declining death rate in that age group up to 2024.

TLDR – the far right are pushing a rubbish claim that tens of thousands more Irish people are dying and it's vaccines to blame. Their source is an incompetent non-statistician pushing lies through his website and substack. The increase in deaths in Ireland could have been predicted a decade ago based increased life expectancy and birth rates. Their claim regarding more young people dying suddenly is disproven in less than 5 minutes of analysis of publicly available data.