Population, Emigration and the 1926 Census

When the results of the 1926 census were published in August 1926 the question arose; would Ireland’s population decline of the previous 80 years finally be reversed? Census results rarely excite great public attention, yet this was a major story, attracting extensive discussion in all the Irish newspapers. As the Irish Times noted this was the ‘first Free State Census Figures’ after independence, and since the last census was undertaken by the British authorities in 1911, this was a major moment in Ireland’s population history.

The wider backdrop was the nationalist struggle for independence. Nationalists such as Pádraig Pearse had argued that the removal of British rule in Ireland would enable the Irish population to grow as misrule and poor policies had resulted in mass emigration since the Great Famine of the 1840s. Millions of people left Ireland under the Union with Great Britain, estimated to number at least 8 million between 1801 and 1921. The consequence of this mass exodus was a population more or less cut in half between 1841 and 1911.

Any optimism was short-lived. The results showed that the population of independent Ireland had declined by over 5%to 2,971,992 people over the 15-year interval between the censuses. This was by no means a disaster and the newspaper coverage stressed the effect of the British withdrawal in 1922, including the emigration of civil servants and those serving in crown forces, both the Royal Irish Constabulary and the British army, and the number of Irish deaths in the First World War.  So, it partly could be explained.

The other significant trend was the decline in the number of people living in rural areas, or to put it another way, the growth in the proportion of people living in towns across the country. This was a long-term trend, and not just in Ireland, but across western European societies as people left the land in search of work in cities and towns. By the 1950s the decline in the Irish rural population became a major issue for policy makers.

The large and exceptional outflow associated with the end of the British regime marks a number of important changes in the flow of emigrants out of Ireland. Both the First World War and the War of Independence (1919-21) severely inhibited emigration, especially long-distance movement to the United States. In 1924, the US authorities imposed a new set of restrictions under the Johnson-Reed Act which made it more difficult for Irish people to travel to the United States. So, by the time the census was taken in April 1926 the mass movements of the 19^th century were no longer a feature of the demographic exceptionality of Ireland. Mass migration would return though in the 1940s and 1950s as the independent Irish state faced an existential crisis.

Within the overall pattern of population decline there were important elements that again merited discussion when the detailed census reports containing the data on religion were published in 1929 as a separate volume. What this demonstrated in granular detail was the demographic decline of Protestants in the south of Ireland. As the Church of Ireland Gazette, the organ of Irish Anglicanism observed ‘Our people marry later, have fewer children, and a dreadfully large proportion of the young men and women seek careers abroad’. Much of the debate centred on the culture of emigration that was embedded in the consciousness of Irish Protestants, who saw little future in Ireland, and largely moved to Britain.

Explaining this decline has been the source of often contentious debate among historians of the Irish revolutionary era. Some see it as directly and irrevocably associated with the attacks on Irish Protestants during the War of Independence and the sectarian motive held by some Irish nationalists that underpinned this violence. Others point to the long-term patterns of demographic decline exhibited by minority religious groups associated with the final stages of British rule in Ireland. The release of the 1926 census records will enable scholars to trace detailed individual and family histories over time and explore the life histories of individuals.

One final element prompted by the 1926 census is the most significant change in the history of Irish emigration since the Great Famine. When emigration resumed again after the Great Depression of 1929-33, Irish men and women chose short-distance travel to Britain over transatlantic movement to the United States in what was a major shift in Irish emigration history. Proximity to home, the buoyant British economy and American restrictions made Britain the destination of choice for the remainder of the twentieth century.