Irish Economic and Social History

Scholars have long debated whether there was enough food in Ireland to feed the population during the Great Irish Famine; there has been less detailed examination of high-frequency data to understand how markets distributed food after the harvests failed. This article explores a hitherto unused weekly price and quantity data set from the Cork city markets to analyse how markets may have hindered the distribution of available food from 1846 to 1849. Although, historically, economists have long suspected that raw data on the market for potatoes during the Irish Famine behaved like that for a classical ‘Giffen’ good, there is little evidence for this among foodstuffs available throughout the crisis in Cork. But bacon pigs – a food that never reached a stable equilibrium but completely disappeared from the market in 1847 – exhibited some characteristics which do not appear to accord with the classical law of demand. Further analysis of this data suggests that middle-class purchasing power outbid the poorest people in Ireland at a time when there was a surplus of superior foods and a deficiency of inferior foods. These circumstances indicate that unusual market behaviour may have made the crop failure’s redistributive consequences – as well as its mortality toll – much worse.

This article surveys independent Ireland’s economic policies and performance. It has three main messages. First, the economic history of post-independence Ireland was not particularly unusual. Very often, things that were happening in Ireland were happening elsewhere as well. Second, for a long time, we were hampered by an excessive dependence on a poorly performing UK economy. And third, EC membership in 1973 and the single market programme of the late 1980s and early 1990s were absolutely crucial for us. Irish independence and European Union (EU) membership have complemented each other, rather than being in conflict: Each was required to give full effect to the other. Irish independence would not have worked as well for us as it did without the EU; and the EU would not have worked as well for us as it did without political independence.

The new Irish export-oriented foreign direct investment (FDI) regime of the 1950s was an inter-party government initiative that facilitated the later Whitaker and Lemass–led dismantling of protectionist trade barriers. The potential opposition of protectionist-era industry to the new FDI regime was defused by confining the new tax relief to profits derived solely from exports, by allocating new industrial grants only to firms that ‘would not compete in the home market with existing firms’, and by retaining the Control of Manufactures Acts of the 1930s that imposed restrictions on foreign ownership. The fact that the United States had overtaken the United Kingdom as the major global source of FDI made it easier to secure Fianna Fáil support. US firms were particularly interested in access to European Economic Community (EEC) markets, however, which was not within Ireland’s gift. The export processing zone at Shannon, which might be seen as Lemass’s response to the inter-party initiatives, proved to be of immediate appeal to them. US firms would come to predominate in the non-Shannon region only after Ireland’s entry to the EEC.

The relationship of Irish radicals and socialists to Jews in the decades before Irish independence was an ambivalent one. Neither political activists nor trade union leaders were immune to infection by anti-Semitic tropes. An influx of poor Jewish immigrants to Ireland around the end of the nineteenth century threatened the identity of Irish nationalists and workers, at a time when many Irish were forced by economic circumstances to emigrate. The article concludes that statements by James Larkin and other Irish labour activists and reformers about Jews, expressed in print in the early twentieth century, reflected a mixture of attitudes.

The Irish cooperative movement in the dairy industry was driven from above, first by the philanthropic Irish Agricultural Organisation Society and then by the Irish Free State. Although the early cooperative movement has been linked with constructive unionism, this article highlights important continuities in the approach taken to cooperative creameries by the Irish Free State government in the 1920s. Using the problem of creamery management as a focus, it argues that the movement was unable to deliver on its stated goal of democratic empowerment of farmers. Instead, it was the means through which power was renegotiated between farmers, landlords and the state in the context of two crucial transitional moments.

Hercules Street and Hercules Place were two of Belfast’s oldest streets and, by the mid-nineteenth century, they were in the town centre. These streets always had a large concentration of butchers (a cluster). This cluster was broken up in 1880 when the area was cleared to create a new, modern street and did not reform. The clearance was to improve traffic flow but also for reasons of civic pride; despite the unpleasant nature of the butchery trade neither that, nor public health were stated reasons for this clearance. This article examines the economy and society of these streets and the effects of the dislocation caused by the clearance of this area.

Tax assessments provide unique information about the individual and relative wealth of early modern individuals and communities, but few such sources exist for early modern Ireland, so the survival of a tax assessment for the most prosperous inhabitants of Clonmel in 1642 is a unique source for the study of the town’s economic community in that year. An analysis of the tax paid by these men and women provides not merely unrivalled information about their personal wealth but also about the relative prosperity of different occupation groups, including merchants, craftsmen and women, the most important sectors of the local economy and settlement patterns in one early modern Irish town.