The Slow Failure: Population Decline and Independent Ireland, 1920-1973 (review)

For most of the late twentieth century, the social history of Ireland after 1921 suffered from two basic restrictions. The first of these limited subject matter, as generations of historians followed a seemingly canonical prohibition against the academic discussion of contemporary issues. The second constrained methodology; Irish social historians abstained from the interdisciplinary explorations that helped to reshape historiography elsewhere in Europe. This latter practice might be partially excused by the relatively late emergence of Irish sociology, during the early 1960s; yet the combined effect of these conditions meant that the best accounts of life in post-independence Ireland came in shorter, and highly specialized, reports from fields like sociology and demography, and not from historians. This double narrowness was especially confining for those who wished to examine Irish population history.

After nearly a century of nationalist promises of immediate population growth once Ireland was freed from the British yoke, the leaders of the Free State faced continued stagnation on that index—followed by an absolute decrease during the 1950s that raised questions about the basic viability of the Irish state. Revisionist opponents were only slightly more engaged, content to gloat about the shrinking Irish nation without any substantive explanation of how Irish independence would spur population decline. Students of Irish history—bereft of serious historical treatment—were left with a handful of dated sources on the matter of population: Conrad Arensberg and Solon T. Kimball's study of Clare in the 1930s, the reports of the Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems from 1948 to 1954, and John A. O'Brien's 1953 collection of impressionistic commentaries, The Vanishing Irish. The study of twentieth-century Irish demography has benefited from the rising fortunes of social history during the last twenty years, however—especially with the 2000 release of Enda Delaney's cross-disciplinary assessment of twentieth-century migration, Demography, State, and Society.

Mary Daly's most recent work, The Slow Failure: Population Decline and Independent Ireland, 1920–1973, has joined Delaney's work in deftly combining an interdisciplinary mix of demographic, economic, and sociological information with thorough archival research to produce a comprehensive account. Daly's consideration of Irish nuptiality and fertility offers a wider approach than previous work on Irish population issues, and she includes gender issues in her considerations. But, in the end, her quest for accountability reflects the humanistic approach of the historian.

Although Daly declares in her first chapter, "The Pathology of Irish Demographic History," that she will avoid the pitfalls of national "exceptionalism," her approach to the matter of population focuses on Irish perceptions about demography rather than the conditions themselves—which Delaney covers more thoroughly in his comparative approach. The story of how experts and authorities "interpreted or misinterpreted" such trends makes her account "ultimately . . . a study of Irish mentalités and attitudes toward economic and social development." Few, if any, historians could be better qualified than Daly to plumb the depths of twentieth-century Ireland for the deeper intellectual, religious, and political currents.

Daly begins her account with the two major concerns about Irish population during the interwar era: rural depopulation and marital fertility. Rural Ireland traditionally served as the base of Irish nationalism and of Catholic social teaching, providing an ideological backbone that compensated for "urban spinelessness and shoneenism." Although Daly challenges this dichotomy, her main point pertains to the quixotic attempt to define Irish society as a fixed constant, unaffected by the passage of time.

Daly asserts that rearguard policies intended to preserve this "cardboard image of rural Ireland" in reality only sped social change. The most plausible reform, land redistribution, fell victim to the veto of large landowners, who insisted that property rights served as the sacrosanct base of rural Irish society. Other programs, such as agricultural subsidies and unemployment assistance, facilitated the spread of "monetization," replacing traditional relationships with a cash nexus that hastened the departure of agricultural labor. Even well intentioned groups like Muintir na...