“When one contemplates calmly and dispassionately the national life of Ireland at this moment”, wrote Seumas O’Sullivan in his editorial for the April 1926 issue of The Dublin Magazine, the “most notable” thing is “the abrupt severance of the present from the immediate past”. The preceding decade had been so dramatic – world war; global pandemic; revolution; independence – that the shock of the new meant a need to “join up the national consciousness with a suitable and natural tradition”, even as the new State tried to carry on much as its British predecessor had.
One hundred years ago last week, Ireland counted itself for the first time, undertaking its first census since 1911. It was a momentous occasion for the fledgling State and the partitioned island (the returns for Northern Ireland’s separate 1926 census have sadly been destroyed), and the forms encouraged citizens to “Make our first census a success”. This illuminating collection of essays shows that the National Archives’ online release of the 1926 returns, adding to those already available from 1901 and 1911, will give us a unique new insight into a changed Ireland.
With the records of Ireland’s 19th-century British censuses mostly destroyed by the Civil War and bureaucratic rationalisation, and the 1901 and 1911 returns microfilmed by Mormon genealogists, this is an unprecedented project. It involved National Archives staff spending 1,526 days conserving the 564,633 forms, hundreds more repairing those that were damaged, and more again with new digital and AI tools used to transcribe the 1.5 million high-resolution images capturing the original returns.
“To open the bound volumes ... for the first time in 100 years”, writes director Orlaith McBride, “and see the details of people’s lives … given in their own words and in their own handwriting, was both humbling and special for all of us”. That emotion will surely be repeated across the country, and the world, as people log on to look up their relatives.
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Many of the contributors note that the 1926 census recorded an Ireland “in transition”, one both familiar and unfamiliar a century later. Gregory Walls writes that the weekend of the census saw racing at Leopardstown, Bohemians play Shelbourne, and a charity men’s hockey match in skirts. A jewel theft at Mount Juliet and the La Mancha house murders in Malahide occupied the press.
The headline result was the continued decline of Ireland’s population, down by more than half since the Famine, and down another 5.3 per cent since 1911, with more than 400,000 people emigrating in the 15 years. The “pick of the country”, the Anglo-Celt reported, were “departing daily”. Damaging too were the 1918-19 flu pandemic (which killed more than 20,000 in Ireland), and the first World War (which killed perhaps 40,000). Even after a decade marked by so much military service, the ratio of women to men was the lowest in any European country, as young women continued to leave in search of opportunities that would long remain closed to them at home.
The biggest falls were in the Protestant population, which had fallen by an incredible third since 1911. Andy Bielenberg wisely cautions that such a high figure was not primarily a result of violent sectarianism: Protestants had a high rate of emigration even before the Great War, in which they had higher fatalities, while up to 70,000 Protestants may have departed in the withdrawal of the British army and the disbandment of the Royal Irish Constabulary. But it was notable that the first census that covered only 26 counties recorded a more Catholic country.
Marie Coleman finds some of the war veterans restored to their jobs in the Guinness brewery, living in the Killester Garden Village built for ex-servicemen. Those veterans would fade from (or be written out of) the new State’s official memory, and even the Catholic Anglo-Irish felt increasingly out of time. The Earl of Granard (later chairman of Arsenal FC) filled out the details of the 40 people on his 1,618 acres at Castleforbes Demesne in Longford on a typewriter rather than by hand, and reflected the complexity of regime change by listing his occupation as “Master of Horse to the King; IFS Senator; Peer”.
“For all the census tells us”, writes Anne Dolan in a perceptive contribution, “there is a lot we have to infer”, not least in a country so marked by absence. In Miltown Malbay, John Finucane listed many people not present on his form, including his grown and gone children, and his late wife who had died in 1921. He might have misunderstood the instructions, Dolan writes, or “maybe he missed them, maybe they remained part of his thoughts, part of his everyday life”.
That life, Dolan notes, was “harder than the word ‘everyday’ implies”, and the census revealed the depths of poverty in the new Ireland. Padraig Yeates and Ida Milne find that in inner-city Dublin tenements, few of the residents from 1911 remained by 1926, such was the churn of housing poverty, emigration and disease. Ruth McManus notes that this newspaper’s editorial on the returns highlighted “the crying needs of the people for better housing” in both the inner cities and the impoverished rural west.
Perhaps the biggest subtext was in the description of many women’s occupation as “home duties”, obscuring all manner of domestic, agricultural, and “liminal economy” work. “The state”, Lindsay Earner-Byrne writes, “did not wish to see this world”, and the category “would continue to obscure women’s lives in Irish censuses until 1961”.
Rob Goodbody shows that there was plenty of industry in Ireland in 1926, but the majority of people still worked in agriculture. Their poverty should not be romanticised, but unlike elsewhere in Europe, the British Land Acts of the early 1900s meant that most were now living on their own family farms (which a few still insisted on measuring in the “Irish acres” dating from the Tudor conquest).
Family is at the heart of these returns, and many contributors follow the natural impulse to trace their own. In a fascinating exploration of her ancestors and their neighbours in Headford, Co Galway, Kate O’Malley reveals a story of Civil War and migration that would eventually put two neighbours just miles from each other across Korea’s 38th Parallel.
There were perhaps a million Irish-born people in the United States in 1926, along with millions more of Irish heritage. But the 1924 US Immigration Act was about to restrict future arrivals, severing the direct link with Irish America and helping turn emigration back to Britain, where a huge number of the children listed on the 1926 census would end up.
There was migration at home too: in a shrinking country, Dublin’s population was up 30 per cent from 1911. Arrivals from abroad were small, but John Gibney finds “some of the new Irish from an earlier time”. Roman Carlos Marcella was selling fish and chips in Limerick. Solomon Danker and his family were Jews from Riga running a furniture business in Cavan. Berlin mechanic Johann Oldenberg was among the many Germans listed in the 799 people at the work camp for the Shannon Hydroelectric Scheme that began that year.
“Everywhere”, Ellen Rowley writes, “there were building needs: for better roads and homes, hospitals and schools, post office and libraries”. Constructing a new state would be as much physical as cultural, but there was great symbolism in the census forms being available in Irish, something never permitted under British rule.
[ Here’s one thing to look forward to this year: the release of the 1926 censusOpens in new window ]
The government had found coming up with a question on language “very difficult”, and its returns were mixed, but Gregory Walls writes that their release provides “an invaluable baseline” for the fate of the language. In a nuanced analysis of answers on Irish speaking, Cormac Ó Gráda writes that the census captured the language in “a moment of transition”, just after independence and the 1925 Gaeltacht Commission had prioritised it, and just before it “would go into free fall” in many places.
Only 5,793 forms were returned in Irish, less than 1 per cent of the total. Some of those were from republicans who rejected the authority of the new State. On Serpentine Avenue in Ballsbridge, Éamon de Valera listed his occupation as “Teachta Dála” at a time when he was considering ending his abstention from the new parliament. In Cork city, Máire nic Suibhne (who had completed her 1911 return in Irish as a political protest), noted in flourishing Gaelic script that she had only filled out the form under order of “Rialtas na Poblachta”.
Yet the country was healing: Paul Rouse notes that the All-Ireland football winning Kerry team was led by Con Brosnan and John-Joe Sheehy, who had fought on opposite sides of the Civil War. The new State was finding its feet, even as it struggled with its scars and sins. Frank Shovlin writes that Seumas O’Sullivan warned that “it is not safe for man to set his gaze backwards”, unless he can also keep sight of “the futurity of the spirit”. From our ancestors’ future, it is a great privilege to now be able to view our past and their present.
Christopher Kissane is a historian and writer, and the host of Ireland’s Edge.
Further Reading
The 1926 census records are available at https://nationalarchives.ie/collections/search-the-census
Counting the People: A Survey of the Irish Censuses, 1813-1911 (Four Courts Press, 2003), by E Margaret Crawford. A vital reference for genealogists and researchers on the century of British censuses in Ireland.
Ireland 1922: Independence, Partition, Civil War (Royal Irish Academy, 2022), edited by Fearghal McGarry and Darragh Gannon. An important collection of essays on what one contributor calls “the most undeservedly forgotten year in contemporary Irish history”.
Stacking the Coffins: Influenza, War and Revolution in Ireland, 1918-19 (Manchester UP, 2019), by Ida Milne. A pioneering (and eerily prescient) study of the global pandemic that shook Ireland, and the way that its experience and effects were forgotten.
