population

population. Estimates of numbers of inhabitants for any period prior to the development of the modern state are inevitably speculative. Tentative suggestions put the population at the end of the neolithic period at 100,000 to 200,000, and by the coming of Christianity at about 250,000. Estimates for c.1300, largely based on extrapolation from English figures, range from 675,000 to 1.4 million. There is general agreement that from the early 14th century plague (see Black Death), famine, and warfare caused a sharp loss of numbers. Somewhat more confident estimates for the early modern period suggest that numbers rose from about a million in 1500 to 1.4 million in 1600 and to 2.1 million by 1641. By 1672 population had fallen back to around 1.7 million. It had risen again to between 2.0 and 2.3 million by 1712, but remained close to this level until a new phase of growth commenced in the 1750s.

While the size of the population at any one point in time is uncertain, the broad chronology of change is well defined. During the 16th century population rose at a rate well within the normal pre‐industrial experience. The influx caused by the plantation of Munster was largely offset by the emigration to England or continental Europe promoted by the effects of the Nine Years War and by harvest crises and plague in 1601–5. In the early 17th century the rate of growth increased as a result of formal plantation schemes and more informal colonization. By the 1630s there are indications of emigration to America from Munster, suggesting that growth there had peaked. Much of this early 17th‐century expansion was undone by the emigration which followed war in 1641 and the plague of the early 1650s. In the late 17th century population rose again. In Ulster this was mainly by migration from Scotland, especially in the 1690s, but in Munster the rate of increase, though still significant, was much slower. Since migration to Ireland was over a relatively short distance, compared with transatlantic movement, whole families migrated, ensuring that the sex ratio within the Irish population was not excessively skewed towards males. This, combined with a low land–labour ratio, permitted earlier marriage than in England and a longer child‐bearing period for women. From the evidence of Quaker families average completed family size in Ireland was 5.4 compared to 4 in England. The stability of the population in the early 18th century seems due to a number of factors. The rise of emigration to America from Ulster provided an escape valve for a surplus population but depressed economic conditions generally may also have lowered the marriage rate. Two major subsistence crises in the 1720s and 1740–1 also had the effect of keeping population low, the latter crisis probably being more severe in its demographic impact than the Great Famine of the 1840s.

Change in the size of the population ws paralleled by shifts in its distribution. In the 16th century Ulster was the least densely populated area, followed by Munster and Connacht, with the greatest density of population in the Leinster Pale. The 1660 poll money returns suggest that Ulster was now well settled and north Leinster was also densely populated. Connacht, by contrast, was falling behind in relative terms. By the end of the 17th century a new pattern, with the population gradient running east‐west rather than north‐south as it had done in the 16th century, was well established. This shift was accompanied by a greater concentration of population in towns, with the expansion of older centres such as Dublin and the establishment of new ones such as Belfast and Derry.

From the middle of the 18th century population began to expand at an unprecedented rate. By 1791 numbers had risen to around 4.4 million, and by 1821 to 6.8 million. Growth was clearly related to economic prosperity: the expansion of agriculture in response to the opening of new overseas markets, first in the British and French colonies across the Atlantic, later in the rising industrial cities of Great Britain, and the growth of linen and other manufactured goods. The precise mechanisms, however, remain unclear. An older tradition of explanation suggested a sharp fall in the age of marriage, made possible by subdivision of agricultural holdings and increased reliance on a potato diet. More recent work suggests that early modern Ireland was a ‘high pressure’ demographic system, in which already low marriage ages were balanced by high mortality. What disturbed this equilibrium was a marked decline in mortality, especially infant mortality, reflecting increased resources, better mechanisms of poor relief, and medical improvement.

After 1815, as agricultural prices fell following the end of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, and rural manufacturing contracted, the pressure of rising numbers became increasingly difficult to sustain. With increased emigration and a likely rise in marriage ages population growth began to level off. Numbers rose from 6.8 million in 1821 to 7.8 million in 1831, but to only 8.2 million by 1841. Even if the potato crop had not failed catastrophically from 1845, population might well have declined from mid‐century. As it was, death and emigration during the Great Famine reduced population to 6.5 million by 1851.

The pattern of a falling and then stagnant population established from the 1840s continued for well over a century. In a more prosperous but restrictive society marriage was strictly tied to resources, with men waiting to obtain possession of the family farm, and women for the provision of a suitable dowry, before marrying, often by means of an arranged ‘match’. A substantial minority never married at all. Heavy emigration carried away those for whom no provision could be made under this system, as well as those displaced by the move from labour‐intensive tillage to pasture, and those for whom the new awareness of emigration as an option opened up the possibility of a better life abroad. Population fell to 4.4 million by 1911.

To the consternation of many, for whom the annual haemorrhage of Irish youth by emigration had been one of the great indictments of British rule, political independence did little to stem the outward flow, or to alter other demographic patterns. The population of the Irish Free State declined from just short of 3 million in 1926 to 2.8 million in 1961. (Northern Ireland had a gradual but steady increase, from 1.25 million in 1926 to 1.4 million in 1956.) Official concern at the pattern of decline was reflected in the establishment of the Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems, which reported in 1954. It was not until the 1960s, following the sudden prosperity associated with new economic policies (see Economic Development), that emigration fell off, allowing population in independent Ireland to rise to 3.5 million by 1986. Even today Ireland's population density remains strikingly below the European average.

Bibliography

Cullen, L. M. , Population Trends in Seventeenth Century Ireland, Economic and Social Review, 6 (1974–5)
Dickson, D.,, Ó Gráda, C.,, and and Daultry, S. , Hearth Tax, Household Size and Irish Population Change, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 82 (1982)
Kennedy, R. E. , The Irish: Emigration, Marriage and Fertility (1973)

RG/ and Raymond Gillespie