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22 Religion and Society in Pre-Famine Ireland The first population censuses were taken in Ireland in 1821, 1831, and 1841, but while they contain geographically detailed information about the distribution of the population, they did not include any information on religion . The Commission of Public Instruction, Ireland, taken in 1834, does, however provide us with data on religion for this period. The Commission was instigated by the nonconformist Whig government in London, which sought to use its results to assail the privileged position of the established Church of Ireland.1 Prior to this survey the extent of the Catholic majority in Ireland had been grossly underestimated, and the desire to uncover the demographic strengths of Ireland’s religions was fueled by a strong desire among Protestant evangelicals to proselytize the majority group.2 This chapter uses the Commission and the early censuses to explore the geographies of religion and society immediately before the Great Famine of the late 1840s. They show that Ireland had both similarities with and differences from the rest of Europe. As with other European countries, the population was starting to grow rapidly; however, in Ireland a lack of industrialization meant that rural population pressures were growing. The island also already had clear and polarized spatioreligious patterns that still closely followed those laid down during the plantations. Presbyterians, primarily the descendants of private Scottish planters and ad hoc migrants, were concentrated in the northeast of the island. The Church of Ireland had a much more fragmented pattern, being spread along south Ulster and east Leinster and reflecting the relative lack of success of the plantations in many of these areas. The rest of the island was overwhelmingly Catholic. The first part of this chapter uses the 1834 Commission to describe the geographies of religion of the early nineteenth century and explores the extent to which these geographies had their roots in the plantation period. The second part is more forward-looking, exploring how nineteenth-century trends such as population growth and industrialization were emerging in this period and how Ireland was in some ways similar to other parts of Europe and in other ways very different from them. The differences, in particular, were to have deadly consequences when famine struck and also ensured that the Great Famine would have impacts in Catholic Ireland different from those in more Protestant parts. Religion in 1834 The 1834 Commission provides us with the first detailed survey of the distribution of Irish religion. The survey, available in digital form for the Church of Ireland’s dioceses, of which there were only thirty-two, does not provide 3 23 Religion and Society in Pre-Famine Ireland the level of spatial detail that is available in later sources. Nevertheless, this source does present the best available snapshot of religion in the preFamine period. It shows that across the island 80.9 percent of the population professed to be Catholic, while the Church of Ireland was slightly the larger of the two major Protestant groups, with 10.7 percent to the Presbyterians ’ 8.1 percent. “Other Protestants” made up only 0.27 percent of the population. While these data must be treated with a little caution, they have been described as being “remarkably accurate for an early nineteenthcentury statistical study.”3 The three maps in figure 3.1 show the spatial distribution of the three largest religions as recorded in 1834. Each of the three groups has a distinctive geography. Catholics were by far the largest individual religion in Ireland, predominating across the three southern provinces of Connacht, Munster, and Leinster. Over the bulk of this area Catholics accounted for over 90 percent of the diocesan population. Even in the extreme northeast of the island, where they were least represented, they still accounted for over 25 percent of the population of the dioceses of Connor and Down, which approximate to the counties of Antrim and Down, respectively. The Church of Ireland has a less concentrated pattern, with no diocese having over 40 percent of its total population being drawn from this religion, yet a clear geography is evident, straddling south Ulster and north and east Leinster. For the Presbyterian Church the distribution is again markedly different, being heavily concentrated in the extreme northeast of the island . While their proportion of the population of a diocese never exceeded 60 percent, Presbyterians did constitute over 40 percent in all of the dioceses facing Scotland and over 50 percent of the population of Connor and Down...

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