When I was growing up in rural south Down, the fact that a well-regarded lady in our district was able to celebrate her 100th birthday was a major talking point and viewed with something close to astonishment.
Age projections have obviously altered significantly since then, but it still came as a surprise to hear taoiseach Simon Harris declare during an address in Donegal last month that a baby born in Ireland today has a 50 per cent chance of eventually becoming a centenarian.
The available statistics suggest that, when I was a child, fewer than one in 100,000 might have matched my neighbour’s achievement in reaching 100, while it now appears that every second person in the coming generation may follow in her footsteps.
It all represents a massive change, with enormous implications for all aspects of our society, but it is an issue which is seldom publicly discussed and the level of preparation on the part of the authorities is very much open to question.
Irish life expectancy was 65 as recently as the 1950s, rising steadily to 73 in the 1980s and just under 83 at present, a figure which is already one of the highest in the western world and is inevitably going to head towards the 90s in the coming years.
The Biblical prediction that our promised age was three score and ten, otherwise 70, was unduly hopeful in the past but is now completely pessimistic and can safely be allowed to fade into the history books.
United Nations data places the present UK life expectancy at 81.4 years, behind the world leader, Hong Kong, at 85.6, but well ahead of several African nations at the other end of the list, with Nigeria at the bottom on 54.6.
A paper published in the Irish Medical Journal said that the extension of human lifetimes could be attributed to improvements in nutrition, in income and wealth, in behaviour, in education, in public health and in medicine.
There are complexities involved in all these calculations, but, to put it simply, it does not take a scientist to confirm that more and more people are going to be living longer and longer.
It all indicates that we need to adjust to a different world, in which it will be normal for citizens not just to be surviving well into their 80s but also to be playing central and important roles in different areas.
This is not a reference to the forthcoming US presidential election where the initial contest was between one candidate aged 81 who had already lost some of his key faculties and another in his 79th year who never had most of them in the first place.
It means instead that we should not just get used to the idea of older people staying in employment at more advanced stages, as is already happening, but increasingly maintaining other significant public and private roles when they are well past the standard retirement age.
Health, sadly, will always be an uncertain factor, and even those who are in otherwise good physical shape will know that the risk associated with the cruel condition of dementia jumps sharply from the 60s onwards.
However, those who remain mentally agile are going to have an increasing influence in their older years, and may well be the dominant force in many family groups to a much greater degree than was previously the case.
It was fairly rare in the past to come across someone like my maternal grandmother, who praised, criticised and firmly ordered around all her relatives right until her death at 96, but there are going to be many more like her in the decades to come, including the amazing Belfast woman who last month completed her 200th parkrun at the same age.
We should not just get used to the idea of older people staying in employment at more advanced stages, as is already happening, but increasingly maintaining other significant public and private roles when they are well past the standard retirement age
Among the most perceptive and well-argued responses I have received to recent columns was from a lady who also cheerfully admitted to being in her mid-90s.
She happened to know the late Jimmy Kelly, perhaps the greatest journalist in the long history of The Irish News, who filed his last article for the paper back in 2011 at the age of 100.
Jimmy was likely to have met George Bernard Shaw and would probably have agreed with his famous observation that youth is wasted on the young. We have not yet reached a stage where youthful critics claim that maturity is wasted on the elderly, but we could be moving in that direction.
