Waves Of Migration
Alan Crosby considers what the latest Irish census tells us about the country’s fortunes
Famine and starvation were followed by a massive exodus
There was a census in the Republic of Ireland at the beginning of April 2022, postponed from 2021 because of the pandemic. The preliminary results, published in late June, generated a good deal of attention, because the population (at 5.12 million) had exceeded five million for the first time since 1841. A year previously, the Northern Ireland census showed a population of 1.9 million, the largest ever recorded for the six counties. Overall, therefore, the population of the island is now 7.02 million, compared with 8.2 million in 1841.
It has been growing with extraordinary speed since the late 18th century – between 1821 and 1841 the number of people in the four western counties (Kerry, Clare, Galway and Mayo) increased by over one-third. The growth was sustained by an ever-greater dependence upon a single foodstuff: the humble potato. The peak population was reached in 1844–1845, with about 8.4 million people. Then came the catastrophe of the Great Famine (1845– 1848), caused by the destruction of the potato crop by blight. An estimated one million people died of starvation or disease. Already by 1851 the population had fallen to 6.5 million.
Famine and starvation were followed by a massive exodus, as Irish people emigrated to Great Britain and North America in huge numbers. A particularly revealing statistic is that in 1911 the island-wide population had fallen to 4.4 million – slightly over half the number 70 years earlier. The haemorrhage of population continued for several more decades, so that by the beginning of the 1960s the Republic had only 2.8 million people.
The figures are shocking, but of course there’s much more to this story than mere numbers. Not only was this the greatest natural disaster in these islands since the Black Death – an unenviable record that still stands – but it profoundly affected almost every urban community in Britain. By 1851 over 10 per cent of the population of Lancashire was Irish-born, as was 9.2 per cent of the inhabitants of Middlesbrough. In Dumbarton near Glasgow the figure was a remarkable 17.7 per cent.
These Irish communities in later Victorian Britain tended to live in the poorest parts of a town or city, with the worst housing, least sanitation, and highest death rates. The Irish were typically blamed for almost any social problem – disease, civil unrest, crime, overcrowding, drunkenness. Only slowly did they begin to assimilate, and the census returns for 1881–1911 reveal the way that Irish-born or Irishdescended people were concentrated in particular districts or, in smaller towns, in certain streets.
For family history the Great Famine and its long, sad sa aftermath have enormous importance. About 15 1 years ago it was estimated that approximately 10 1 per cent of the population of Great Britain had an Irish grandparent, but if we go back to the mid-Victorian period, finding an Irish ancestor is a statistical probability. In my own case, it’s a great great grandmother, born in Dublin in 1834, who had arrived in England by 1850. That little drop of Irish blood (one-sixteenth, to be precise) means a lot to me! Overall, it has been calculated that more than 10 million people have emigrated from Ireland since the beginning of the 19th century.
However, Ireland has changed remarkably in the past few decades, and the population growth is part of that. In the mid-1960s the decline that had been continuous since 1845 was reversed, and the numbers slowly crept up. As the economy boomed in the 1990s, many Irish-born emigrants returned from overseas, and membership of the EU meant that large communities of Poles, Lithuanians and other European nationalities developed. Growth slackened after the 2008 crash, and during the pandemic, but it is continuing. My great great grandmother Catherine played her part in the story of migration and poverty that has grown family trees all over the world.