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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 l