You can't take the number of deaths from a larger population and then express it as a percentage of a smaller population, and then claim to be making a meaningful statement. It's a basic rule of statistics that the numerator and the denominator for a percentage must be counting the same thing. The article is very vague about the details, but this seems to be a count of diocesan priests, whereas the count of deaths seems to include not just diocesan priests, but also religious priests and religious brothers. The figures given in the article say that between "working priests" and "retired priests", the total number of priests in Ireland in Ireland at the end of 2018 was a little over 2,500. If it represents 22% of "priests and brothers", then the total number is 2,527. If 556 represents 21%, then the total number of "priests and brothers" is 2,648. It says this represents "more than 21%" of "priests and brothers". It speaks about a total number of deaths from amongst priests and brothers of 556 over the calendar years 2019-2021 inclusive. However, it seems to me that the article is playing fast and loose with the numbers. That being said - and I have been saying this for years - most people both inside and outside the Church don't have a good grasp of how quickly the cohort of clergy in Ireland is aging and how quickly the numbers of serving priests in our dioceses will decline over the next 5 to 10 years. My first reaction was to doubt the headline figure as being implausible - or at the very least giving a misleading picture of the situation in Ireland. More than 20% of priests and brothers have died in past three years? I was interested to read this in the Irish Examiner.
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