A SPREADSHEET CLAIMING that Ireland’s population will drop by more than 72 percent by 2025 has been shared online, and has falsely been described as being produced by “a military intelligence agency”.
The spreadsheet is attributed to deagel.com, a website that describes itself as being “built on spare time” and “not linked to any government”. The website largely consists of news stories involving military sales copied from mainstream news sources.
Deagel.com suggests that Ireland’s population will fall from 4,770,000 to 1,318,740, a drop of 72.4 percent, by next year (the prediction was made before the latest Census showed Ireland’s population was more than 5 million people).
The chart is no longer available on deagel.com, but has been archived since 2020 and widely shared in fringe communities, including on Irish Instagram accounts, where it has garnered thousands of likes.
The same spreadsheet claims that the population of the UK will reduce by 77% next year, while that of the United States will drop by 68.5%.
A disclaimer note on the now-offline prediction page gives some insight into deagel.com’s rationale for its forecasts.
“The collapse of the Western financial system – and ultimately the Western civilization – has been the major driver in the forecast along with a confluence of crisis with a devastating outcome,” it claims.
”As Covid has proven, Western societies embracing multiculturalism and extreme liberalism are unable to deal with any real hardship.”
The same disclaimer also claims incorrectly that climate change is a “hoax” and that a nuclear war is imminent.
An earlier page of slightly different predictions for 2025 hosted on the same site since at least 2014 gave a different explanation for why they believed that the population of the United States would drop 78%, to a little over 69 million.
It suggested that, rather than the nuclear war they would later predict, the population would reduce because of emigration caused by a financial collapse.
That same 2014 prediction page claimed that Ireland’s population would fall by 43%.
Other claims by the website have been factchecked by the Australian Associated Press (AAP), including a 2012 prediction that the US population would fall from about 314 million to 248 million by 2020: in actuality, a census that year showed that the US population had risen to more than 330 million that year.
The Journal found that Deagel.com also predicted in 2007 that the UK’s population would drop 0.1% to 61 million by 2017 — it, in fact, rose to more than 66 million that year.
Other predictions on the same website likely overestimate future populations by drastic amounts.
For example, the website predicts that Lebanon will reach a population of 6.6 million by 2025. But for such a prediction to be true, Lebanon would need to increase its population by more than a million people in less than a year — an unlikely prospect.
Verdict
Ultimately there is no evidence for the website’s claims.
The spreadsheet claiming that much of the world, including Ireland, will see massive population reductions by next year comes from an independent website with no credentials.
The website gives little plausible explanations for its predictions, which have turned out to be false in the past.
The Journal FactCheck is a signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network’s Code of Principles. You can read it here. For information on how FactCheck works, what the verdicts mean, and how you can take part, check out our Reader’s Guide here. You can read about the team of editors and reporters who work on the factchecks here.
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