Éamon de Valera was one of relatively few citizens to exercise his right to complete the first census of the Irish Free State in his native tongue.
He did so in an eight-roomed house on Serpentine Avenue in Ballsbridge, Co Dublin. De Valera had recently resigned his leadership of Sinn Féin and was in the process of founding a new political party, Fianna Fáil, which would meet for the first time less than a month later.
Just 1 per cent of census forms were written in Irish. This was a reflection on the process rather than the population – enumerators for Gaeltacht areas filled in forms on behalf of Irish-speaking families, opting for English instead of Irish as they did so.
The 1926 census, which took place 100 years ago on Saturday, has been made accessible to all in a digital database on the National Archives of Ireland (NAI) website. An exhibition is also now open to the public at Dublin Castle, contextualising the census’ findings and offering an insight into some of the day’s historical figures through facsimiled census returns.
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De Valera listed himself as a “Teachta Dála” and recorded his birthplace in New York. On their household form, his wife Sinéad was also recorded alongside their seven children, all of whom were under the age of 15 and present on the night of the census. Úna Ní Shuibheannaigh, a 26-year-old domestic servant from Longford, completed the household.
Another recorded TD with a census form completed in Irish was Constance Markievicz, who was boarding at Frankfort Place in Rathmines, Co Dublin at the time of the census. A leader in the 1916 Easter Rising and a committed republican, Markievicz became the first woman elected to the Westminster parliament in 1918, though she did not take her seat.
She too would soon become one of the founding members of Fianna Fáil, but within 15 months of the census, she died at the age of 59 following an unsuccessful appendicitis surgery.
One of Ireland’s best known poets, Nobel Prize winner William Butler Yeats, was 60 years old at the time of the census. He recorded his occupation as “author”, though he was also working as a senator in 1926.
Yeats’ unrequited love for revolutionary Maud Gonne is well documented, as is his proposal to her daughter Iseult, whom he had known through her childhood, following Maud’s final rejection. At the time of the census though, he was married to Georgina Hyde-Lees, and the pair had a son and daughter. Their household was completed by three domestic servants.
In Cloyne, Co Cork, Nicholas Christopher Ring, better known as Christy, was five years old at the time of the census. Ring would go on to win eight All-Ireland senior hurling championships for Cork, becoming one of the biggest names in Irish sporting history.
As with Christy Ring, a search for Samuel Beckett in the archives will fail to produce the desired results. Instead, Sam A Barclay Beckett is recorded as a 20-year-old medical student in Foxrock, Co Dublin.
It was two years prior to Beckett’s first stint in France, where he would go on to reside for much of his life, famously remarking that he would prefer “France at war to Ireland at peace”.
There are no such titular issues with three-year-old Brendan Behan, who is recorded as a resident of Russell Street in Dublin’s north inner-city 32 years prior to the publication of Borstal Boy.
The exhibition spotlights famous faces, but also features lesser known figures in Irish history with the aim of contextualising the early days of the Irish Free State.
