DEPOPULATION IN POST-FAMINE IRELAND

I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that ye shall soon utterly perish from off the land.

— Deuteronomy 4:26a

Many Countries in the modern world face or will soon face one of two population problems. Some countries' populations are growing so rapidly that sheer numbers will endanger their ability to provide schooling, employment, and basic social amenities to their people. The physical requirements of the human population may overwhelm the environment's ability to provide for both it and local nonhuman populations. Other countries face a situation nearly the opposite. Their population is either growing very slowly or, in some cases, already declining. When growth continues at a slow rate, older people make up an increasingly large share of the society and eventually the population's numbers may begin to shrink. Rapid population growth now seems confined to the poorest societies, slow growth or decline seems the fate of the wealthier. Ireland faced both of these population problems during the nineteenth century: prior to the Great Famine of the 1840s, Ireland's population grew at unprecedented rates, while for over a century after the Great Famine the population shrank continuously. Part of this population decline reflects mortality and emigration during the Famine, but much of the depopulation occurred between 1850 and the First World War, after famine conditions had all but disappeared from the island. Most of the Irish decline, that is, reflects voluntary actions — emigration, postponing or avoiding marriage — rather than famine.

This book tells the story of that depopulation and why it took the form it did. Throughout I focus on rural Ireland because depopulation in Ireland was confined to rural areas almost exclusively. The ways in which the Irish were vanishing may be more noteworthy than the depopulation itself. To many writers the difference between Irish and other demographic regimes at the turn of the twentieth century has seemed an interesting, if quaint, illustration of the variety of ways populations can adjust to economic and social conditions. Here I examine the demographic differences from another perspective. My purpose is to understand why young Irish people made the decisions about marriage, emigration, and childbearing that produced Ireland's distinctive demographic regime.

The Famine's direct role in Ireland's depopulation over this period is less than one might think. Figure 1.1 shows the populations of Ireland and England from the early eighteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. Less than half of the total depopulation in Ireland from 1841 to 1911 can be attributed to the Famine itself. After the Famine the population declined without cease; by 1911 Ireland contained about half as many people as had lived there in 1841. Sustained reversal came only in the 1960s, and population growth since then has been modest. Population decline in Ireland along with rapid growth in Great Britain altered the weight of Ireland's population in the United Kingdom over the nineteenth century. In 1841 the Irish represented about a third of the United Kingdom's entire population. By 1911 Ireland formed less than a tenth of that whole.

Depopulation in the late nineteenth century was not confined to Ireland. Agricultural transformation at home and the pull of higher wages in cities and abroad also reduced the rural population in several regions of Great Britain and other European countries. In most other countries, however, depopulation was limited to specific areas (usually those most agricultural) and specific periods. One striking example comes from the United States, a country whose nineteenth-century population growth rates were extremely rapid for the day. Rural depopulation was under way in New England as early as 1860: between that date and 1920 the states of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont all experienced slow population growth overall coupled with an absolute loss of population in rural areas. Ogle (1889, table A) documents population declines in several of England's more agricultural counties for the interval 1851 to 1881. In his discussion of England, Scotland, and Ireland, Longstaff (1893, pp. 388-389) notes that only twelve of Scotland's thirty-three counties had experienced uninterrupted population growth since 1801. Nine counties had reached their maximum population (as of 1891) in 1851 or earlier. Depopulation continued in some areas into the twentieth century. Population growth in Scotland from 1861 to 1911 was largely confined to narrow areas around the cities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, and Aberdeen. Without rapid growth in these urbanized areas Scotland's overall population would have declined, just as in Ireland (Anderson and Morse 1993a, b). Longstaff thought that rural depopulation was under way or at least imminent not only in the United Kingdom but in France, Norway, Italy, and elsewhere (p. 411). Rural depopulation in England owed more to migration from agricultural districts than to the low birthrates so important in Ireland. Elsewhere, as in the northern Portuguese communities studied by O'Neill and Brettell, population declines followed from emigration and reduced marriage, the pattern in Ireland. Today the rural regions of industrial countries find it increasingly difficult to keep their population on the land. Between 1980 and 1990 in the United States, for example, the state of Iowa lost over 8 percent of its rural population.

Depopulation was thus not something specific to rural Ireland. The assertion or assumption of Ireland's uniqueness is, however, a quite general phenomenon. Rhodes (1992, p. xi), for example, begins her study of Irish women with the comment that "studies of Irish society show it to have characteristics which range from the unusual to the unique to the positively perverse." Every society is unique, almost by definition: no two societies share all the characteristics that define a group of people. As a literal description there is nothing harmful about claims of Irish uniqueness. Underlying the claim, however, is often an unstated assumption that we need not explain the demographic behavior of Ireland because, after all, it was populated by the Irish. Such an assertion, stated or not, is incorrect. Ireland's historical development was the result not of Hibernian perversity, but of the way the people there made their lives in often difficult circumstances.

The basic demographic facts at issue in Irish history are clear. Much of this study consists of looking more closely at details, or criticizing and reformulating explanations for those demographic facts. Since this process...