The 1926 Census was weaponised by opponents of the then-government within months of its completion, with some critics using it to warn that Ireland faced serious stagnation and depopulation if there was not political change, a symposium on the census has heard.
Historian Donal Ó Drisceoil told Census 1926 – Capturing a Social and Cultural Moment, an academic gathering at University College Cork (UCC), that the statistical data gathered in the census was used by republicans to attack the Cumann na nGaedheal government as early as August 1926.
According to Ó Drisceoil, a lecturer in the School of History in UCC, members of the anti-Treaty IRA in their publication, An Phoblacht, focused on “the grim secret revealed by the census – depopulation, social inequality, mass emigration, overcrowding and so on”.
He said the readers of An Phoblacht, edited by Peadar O’Donnell, would also see the term “race extermination” being used against the Cumann na nGaedheal government, which was similar to the term “race suicide” current in some political discussion in the 1920s.
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“Race suicide, this precursor of the contemporary far right, anti-immigration ‘great replacement theory’, had emerged in the US at the turn of the 20th century and related specifically to the ‘race suicide’ of white Americans being outbred and eventually swamped by immigrants.”
According to Ó Drisceoil, Ireland did not face high levels of immigration in 1926, but An Phoblacht used the term “race extermination” and linked it to overcrowding and the failure to provide proper living conditions that would enable the Irish population to expand and thrive.
Fianna Fáil through its publication The Nation, edited by Frank Gallagher, similarly focused on the census returns detailing low and late marriage rates and thus low birth rates as evidence of the Irish nation being threatened with what it called “race suicide”, said Ó Drisceoil.
This, it argued, “was not through birth prevention but through a sheer inability on the part of our young people to get married due to rural and urban poverty and the chronic shortage of houses” though it did concede some remained unmarried due to “the desire to have a good time”.
Simultaneously, various Catholic Action groups in Ireland also latched on to the idea of race suicide and started it using it as argument against the introduction of any form of birth control or contraception that would limit population growth in the fledgling Free State, he said.
“The Catholic Actionists came into their own after the foundation of the state, groups like the Catholic Truth Society, the Irish Vigilance Association and basically they were arguing that birth control was race suicide – that it was threatening the reproduction of the Irish race.”
While Catholic Actionists were railing against birth control amid a 5.3 per cent fall in the general population – down from 3.129 million in 1911 to 2.971 million in 1926, the decline of the Protestant population by 32 per cent from 327,179 in 1911 to 220,723 in 1926 also prompted reaction.
According to Ó Drisceoil, Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats viewed the dramatic decline of the Protestant population as the result of a deliberate strategy to supplant the last vestiges of Anglo-Irish Protestant influences on the Free State.
“In his infamous last book of essays, On the Boiler, Yeats urges forced restraint on lower class breeding and calls on the Irish elites to practice selective breeding to help prevent Anglo-Irish race suicide, enabling ‘the better stocks’ to begin ‘replacing their numbers’,” he said.
“’In centuries past,’ wrote Yeats ‘leisured men ... bred cattle instead of men’ but that ‘great task is done’ – now the Anglo-Irish must ‘defend against degeneration by breeding eugenically,” said Ó Drisceoil as he quoted from Yeats’ collection of essays published posthumously in 1939.
