If you make the mistake of stumbling onto Facebook these days, you'll easily find a barrage of comments on posts claiming there's been a surge in younger people dying. This is categorically untrue. Over the last number of decades, the number of young adults dying each year has been falling. I've graphed out the CSO deaths data for the age group of 15-34 showing how the number of deaths has fallen from over 900 people per year to 500 per year. The misinformation is generally coming from covid vaccine sceptics, looking to push a false narrative that there's some increase in young people dying and in my experience, this lie is spreading to others who innocently "feel" this seems true. A number of politicians have also been pushing this claim to sow seeds of distrust. In my opinion, it's working because of the following:
Rip .ie posts being shared on Facebook. We never had this 15-20 years ago, so if you start seeing posts about deaths more regularly, your brain connects this to an increase in deaths.
Ease of access to non-stop information, more and more people can access the internet and socials than ever, and cannot discern between information and misinformation.
I've pulled together the chart here using CSO deaths and population datasets - for 23 and 24, I've had to use the VDA45 dataset as there's a lag before the VSA35 dataset is updated with final categorisations of deaths, but tends to be quite accurate, with self harm deaths taking a bit longer to be categorised, so I expect those final orange bars to climb a bit still. (I would stress however, per capita, the self harm rate of deaths has fallen 40% since the late 90s - we're in a mental health crisis, but that's because we're talking about it, making it feel more prevalent, but the actual mortality rate has been consistently improving).
Feel free to copy this image and paste it whenever you see folk spreading misinformation about younger people dying at a higher rate in this country.