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Chapter 1: What historical significance does the 1926 census hold for Ireland?
Well, tomorrow is a massive day for anyone interested in the history of this country, the history of their own family or even the history of the street where they live. Exactly 100 years after the first census was taken in the newly independent Irish Free State. All of the information collected, all of the original forms filled out by our ancestors will become freely available online.
It has been a massive undertaking involving digitising 1.5 million images from the original 2,500 volumes. containing half a million individual returns completed on the 18th of April 1926. It gives us a priceless insight into life a century ago and many of those insights are captured in a new book, The Story of Us, Independent Ireland and the 1926 Census. I'm joined now by the book's editors.
Orna McBride is Director of the National Archives and John Gibney, is the Assistant Editor of the Royal Irish Academy's Documents on Irish Foreign Policy programme. Good morning to you both. Exciting times, Orla, and I know a big day ahead and we'll talk about the actual census in a moment. But the book, beautifully produced, what were you trying to achieve with the book?
Really, the book for us was about trying to offer a doorway into what that Ireland of 1926 looked like. So we wanted it to provide a kind of a vivid and a human portrait of the information that's held in the census. So we know everything about the statistics around employment, around Irish language. We know about migration. We know all of those kind of the big themes involved.
that are emerging through the census. And really what we wanted in the book was to open up those themes and to explore who people were, where they lived, the work they did, the languages they spoke, and in many ways bringing historians in to interpret those forms and those villages themselves. those streets, et cetera, in a very tangible way. So, for example, we have a beautiful essay.
And the other thing, David, is they're short. They're all really short. So they're teasers for people. So Sarah Ann Buckley has a wonderful one about the children of Dogfish Lane or Georgina Larraghy, St. Phelan's in Cavan. My own one, from a personal perspective, is about a family story on Gola Island in Donegal. So what we're doing is we're trying to take...
a theme, a place, a street, and then get a historian to delve a little bit deeper and to open it up and then, as I say, hopefully tease it for people.
Yeah, so it gives people an idea of what sort of information is there and what they can use it for. I was particularly interested in it. your piece, Kate O'Malley's piece and Cormac O'Grady's piece, which all looked at your own families and where they were 100 years ago and everything.
And it's really lovely that the information from the census backs up those family stories that would have been passed down through the generations.
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Chapter 2: What insights can we gain from the 1926 census data?
This is on Gola Island.
On Gola Island. But I didn't know much more about it. But then all of a sudden I got the return and then I could begin to see, oh, granddad was alive then. And then all of a sudden I went beyond his return to look at the other returns and then began to look at the newspaper archive
found articles then relating to this tragedy, which befell our family and that we lost our great uncle and our great grandfather. But it then speaks to life on the Western seaboard, life in a rural community on an island community. Rural Ireland was hard enough in 1926, living on an island. of the West Donegal was even harder.
So the census returns really, they offer us just a gateway into other stories, other themes that one can begin to research.
OK, John, we've gone into microscopic detail there on Gold Island. Let's move the focus a bit and look at the broad picture. Ireland in 1926, interesting time, only independent for four years, only three years after the end of the Civil War.
Yeah, the island of 1926 was the Irish Free State, as it then was, three and a half years old.
So in April 1918, or 1926, I should say, when the census was actually taken, just to give you a couple of facts and figures, and I should say, like, well, the granular detail in the sense that the census returns contain that personal information is what's going to be released at, I think, one minute past midnight tonight.
The overall statistics that were collected and collated by the census have been available from the 1920s. And some of them are worth dwelling on just to give a sense of the Ireland of that time. Because, as Orla said, in the book, we tried to give a picture. I mean, people are going to see who lived in Ireland in 1926. What we were trying to do was give a sense of what that Ireland looked like.
And just to give a couple of facts and figures based on what was collected for the census in 1926. The Irish Free State we're talking about was the 26 counties. Ireland had been... The Free State came into existence in December 1922, covering 26 counties. Partition had been confirmed in December 1925.
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Chapter 3: How does the book 'The Story of Us' relate to the 1926 census?
And the War of Independence wasn't really a good time for the police knocking on doors, you know. So it was a 15-year gap. And in that 15 years, you would have had a whole host of events that would have whittled down the population by that 5.3%.
You know, the impact of the First World War, the revolutionary years themselves, the withdrawal of the British garrison, even the Spanish flu pandemic happened. of 1918 and 1919, all took a toll on the population to one degree or another. You know, of that population, 18.3% put themselves down on the census as Irish-speaking.
Now, there's about 700,000 census forms, but less than 6,000 of them were filled out in Irish.
Yeah, that was really interesting, wasn't it? Do we know why?
Is it a literacy thing?
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Five thousand of them were filled out in Irish. And it's the cloacaillac, so it's absolutely beautiful. I couldn't find my grandfather when I was looking, when we were beginning the search. And then I found him. He had filled his out in Irish. And that is just, they're beautiful. They're beautiful to look at, actually.
Yeah.
John, I noticed another statistic that was interesting was that the Irish Free State had the highest proportion of over 65s in the English-speaking world, which is interesting, which is presumably something to do with emigration, but also could be to do with the fact that lots of Irish people lied about their age so they'd qualify for the old age pension back when Lloyd George introduced it.
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Chapter 4: What themes emerge from the personal stories in the census?
So, you know, politicians pop up, but they pop up just as anyone else, you know. And what this does is it captures a particular moment. So we left the politics to one side. That gets enough attention. What we're trying to do is explore the social history, whether it's rural, urban institutions, entertainment, the cinema. We're trying to paint a picture of the world in which these people lived.
Yeah, and Paul Rouse has a very good piece about the social lives and the matches and the cinemas that people would have attended. And Orla, one difference from previous censuses is that people were asked to fill in their employer, which gives huge clues. If you're looking up granny and granddad to see what they were doing 100 years ago, their employer is a key piece of information.
Yeah, it is. And it's particularly interesting in urban areas. In rural areas, it's not so interesting, obviously. But in urban areas, yeah, we're really beginning to see that. Like, for example, you're seeing not only employment, but also migration patterns rolled into one in terms of just a census line. So you might have a young girl who was born in Ballina.
She's living in a tenement house in Marlborough Street and she's working as a domestic servant in a big house in Rathmine. So there are three or four different pieces of information in her one line on the form. But we're also then beginning to see through the employment piece, social mobility. So Cormac O'Grada and his and Muscari and Kerry, he has a Jeremiah Lyons.
And in the 1901 census, he's a shopkeeper. In the 1911 census, he's a grocer. And then by 1926, he's describing himself as a merchant. And he's obviously his own employer. But then you'll begin to see who else in that town is employed by Jeremiah Lyons. So you're beginning to understand the economics of a local town. You can also see it, for example, with the institutions.
and how important the institutions are in terms of, particularly in rural communities, in terms of being an employer. So, for example, Georgina Larraghy's about St. Phelan's in Cavan. So there's a girl, Susan Dempsey, who's a maid and she's employed by St. Phelan's in Cavan. But actually, when we go a bit deeper and... and researched Susan Dempsey a bit more, we realised that St.
Phelan's in Cavan Town used to be the workhouse. Susan was born in the workhouse. And then as a young girl, she was in the industrial school in Cavan. And then as a woman, she comes back to be employed here in St. Phelan's, in Cavan, as a maid and a cleaner. So institutions play their own particular role in Irish life in terms of local employment. You can see that in St.
Bridget's in Ballinasloe, how St. Bridget's, so many people are employed there. and their employment and the multiplier effect within the local town.
And there's institutions and there's people who are institutionalised.
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Chapter 5: What was the demographic landscape of Ireland in 1926?
But in many ways, handwriting also can tell you so much about a person. So obviously we have people who were illiterate who couldn't fill it out. So you can see the X and then you can see very clearly that it's the handwriting of the guard. You also then have
forms where the children are filling them out on behalf of the parents because the parents are illiterate but the children so you can see that it's a child's handwriting that's filling out the form so yeah just the forms themselves there's that emotional piece when you see it and you go oh my god that's my grandfather my great grandfather but then the handwriting itself so for example there's one
which isn't handwritten, we have one typed census return. And that's from a large estate in the Midlands, I will say no more. But that individual who was a man of means had his census return typed out. And it was quite a large census return. There's 10 lines in each return. And his went on for a number of pages because obviously he had quite a large staff working for him.
So that's our only typed return.
Right, I'm just wondering what people will make of my handwriting in 100 years' time. But anyway, we have a couple of texts interesting. One texter asks, did the prisons list the inmates in the census and can they be looked up? I presume the answer is yes.
In Portlaoise and in Mountjoy, they're just initialised. And that is the same across various different institutions. In some, for example, Grange Gorman Asylum, they're initialised. Whereas if you go to, as I said earlier, Ballinasloe or you go to St. Lomans and Mullingar, they're actually named.
So it just depended really on who was running the institution in terms of how they represented the inmates, as they called them.
Margot wants to know, are travellers and seasonal farm workers included in the 1926 census?
Yes, and we do have forms where people say that they're homeless or that they're living in tents. So yes, we do get that peripathetic lifestyle represented in returns also.
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