There will be much interest this year in the release of the census returns for 1926, the first conducted after the establishment of the Irish Free State, with the details stored in almost 1,300 boxes, containing more than 700,000 return sheets. The returns are due to be released in April, exactly a century after the taking of the census. The overall population then was 2,971,992, a decrease of 5.3 per cent from the 1911 census.
The opening of this material will facilitate all sorts of research. The Irish census online project that culminated in 2007 with the release free of charge of the 1901 and 1911 census returns, to be accessed from all corners of the globe (and overseen by Catriona Crowe, then head of special projects at the National Archives), is widely recognised as the single most successful online educational project undertaken in Ireland. By the end of November 2014 it had passed the billion-hit mark.
The project carried even more weight in a country that, as Crowe observed, “has a depressing record of archival self-destruction”, most notably the destruction of the State Paper Office in the Four Courts at the outset of the Civil War in 1922, as combatants brought about the virtual annihilation of the largest body of material on the history of this island ever gathered together.
The release of the 1926 census will provide a further antidote to this and will also prompt us to think about our ancestors in specific ways. The census revealed there were 800,000 people living in overcrowded conditions. Such circumstances caused playwright Seán O’Casey, whose irreverent play The Plough and the Stars generated controversy in 1926, to suggest the recent revolution had done little to change the lot of the poor, as they remained “inanimate patsies”. The infant mortality rate in working-class north Dublin was 25.6 per 1,000, compared to 7.7 among the middle classes, and tuberculosis was still causing 4,500 deaths annually.
READ MORE
The population was 92.6 per cent Catholic at a time when moral arbiters were busy reflecting a degree of moral panic. That year also saw the convening by government of a Committee on Evil Literature. It was the year of the establishment of the state’s new radio service, 2RN.
The simple activity of dancing generated considerable adverse comment, and the Catholic archbishop of Tuam, Thomas Gilmartin, decried the baleful effects of modern entertainment: “Company-keeping under the stars had succeeded in too many places the good old Irish custom of visiting, chatting and story-telling from one house to another, with the Rosary to bring all home in good time.”
But as the historian David Fitzpatrick put it, there was always the more prosaic business of “hay to be saved, cows to be milked, and women to be ordered about”. The census highlighted that there were 269,636 people who belonged to the category of “relatives assisting”. The census was the first in Ireland in which complete and distinct occupational distributions of the population were given.
As the census report observed, the overall official unemployment figure was low – 6 per cent compared to 11.2 per cent for Northern Ireland – but “one of the reasons for the low figure for Saorstát [the Free State] is that the number of persons assisting relatives – persons who run practically no risk of unemployment – are very large in this country”. There were 1,223,014 people over the age of 12 at work, with the largest group (648,575 people, or 53 per cent of the total population) toiling in agriculture. Only 5.6 per cent of married women in the Free State (8,000 women) had professional occupations, compared with 14.5 per cent in Northern Ireland.
[ Birth of Free State and the control and gendering of Irish womenOpens in new window ]
In all, 550,147 women were “engaged in household duties”, though they were not officially recorded or classed as “persons at work”. Census regulations did not allow more than one woman in a household of less than seven persons to be recorded as engaged in these duties, meaning there was an obvious underestimation of their numbers.
The Ireland of 1926 was overwhelmingly rural, with 61 per cent of the population residing outside cities; 36,000 farm labourers were still living in their employers’ housing, and there was much hunger for land ownership. Land transfer and redistribution remained a contentious issue, and the imbalance in farm size was reflected in the number of holdings of one-30 acres (301,084), compared to the number at 200 acres or more (34,298).
The census returns will allow us to build a social and economic profile of the infant State, and to trace the number of those resident in institutions, or suffering from illness at a time when life expectancy was 57.4 years for men and 57.9 years for women.
What many will find of immense value is the chance to place their own family stories and ancestry within these overall themes and contexts, by looking at individual household returns, allowing them to embrace history in a personal and meaningful way.
