    Today Ireland’s population is rising, immigration outpaces emigration, most families have two or at most three children, and full-time farmers are in steady decline. But the opposite was true for more than a century, from the great famine of the 1840s until the 1960s. Between 1922 and 1966—most of the first fifty years after independence—the population of Ireland was falling, in the 1950s as rapidly as in the 1880s. Mary Daly’s The Slow Failure examines not just the reasons for the decline, but the responses to it by politicians, academics, journalists, churchmen, and others who publicly agonized over their nation’s “slow failure.” Eager to reverse population decline but fearful that economic development would undermine Irish national identity, they fashioned statistical evidence to support ultimately fruitless policies to encourage large, rural farm families. Focusing on both Irish government and society, Daly places Ireland’s population history in the mainstream history of independent Ireland.    Daly’s research reveals how pastoral visions of an ideal Ireland made it virtually impossible to reverse the fall in population. Promoting large families, for example, contributed to late marriages, actually slowing population growth further. The crucial issue of emigration failed to attract serious government attention except during World War II; successive Irish governments refused to provide welfare services for emigrants, leaving that role to the Catholic Church. Daly takes these and other elements of an often-sad story, weaving them into essential reading for understanding modern Irish history

The Slow Failure: Population Decline and Independent Ireland, 1920–1973 (History of Ireland & the Irish Diaspora)

History

DALY, Mary E.

Europe

University of Wisconsin Press

This book explores Irish industrial policy in the first two decades following independence. It focuses in particular on the political aspects of industrialization, with special attention paid to subjects like partition and Anglo-Irish relations from 1920 to 1939. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, this book examines the role of institutional traditions and cultural values in economic development, focusing on the threefold influences of nationalism, Catholicism and British political positions. This book should be of interest to students of Irish and economic history. Mary Daly is the author of "A Social History of Ireland Since 1800" and "The Famine in Ireland".

Industrial Development and Irish National Identity, 1922-1939 (Irish Studies)

Business & Money

Management & Leadership

Syracuse Univ Pr

Good only copy, has pen annotations to text. Name on half title page.

The famine in Ireland (Irish History, Second)

Dundalgan Press (W.Tempest) Lt

This is a comprehensive study of the problems which the city of Dublin faced between the famine and World War One. The decline of the city's traditional industries and the rising proportion of casual labourers in the population gave rise to intense poverty which resulted in excessively high death-rates and a housing crisis. These problems were compounded by the migration of the middle-classes to the suburbs where they established autonomous self-governing townships which failed to contribute to city taxes. The alienation of the Protestant middle-class and the growing political dominance by lower middle-class Catholics - many of them slum landlords - who attributed all social and economic ills to the Act of Union, weakened the resolve to tackle the city's major ills. However it seems doubtful whether the problems of the Dublin labouring class could have been resolved within the accepted limitations of state intervention as they existed prior to World war One. The work draws on a wealth of sources to examine topics such as choice of marriage partners, occupational continuity between father and son, the background of tenement families and the corporation tenants, and the role of contemporary charitable institutions - topics hitherto relatively neglected in Irish historical research.

Dublin, the Deposed Capital

Cork University Press

The world of the elderly: The rural experience : a study of the elderly person's experience of living alone in a rural area (The World of the elderly series)

National Council for the Aged

The Battle to Control Female Fertility in Modern Ireland

<p>The Irish battle for legal contraception was a contest over Irish exceptionalism: the belief that Ireland could resist global trends despite the impact of second-wave feminism, falling fertility, and a growing number of women travelling for abortion. It became so lengthy and so divisive because it challenged key tenets of Irish identity: Catholicism, large families, traditional gender roles, and sexual puritanism. The Catholic Church argued that legalising contraception would destroy this way of life, and many citizens agreed. The Battle to Control Female Fertility in Modern Ireland provides new insights on Irish masculinity and fertility control. It highlights women's activism in both liberal and conservative camps, and the consensus between the Catholic and Protestant churches views on contraception for single people. It also shows how contraception and the Pro-Life Amendment campaign affected policy towards Northern Ireland, and it examines the role of health professionals, showing how hospital governance prevented female sterilisation. It is a story of gender, religion, social change, and failing efforts to reaffirm Irish moral exceptionalism.</p>

Cambridge University Press

This provocative new history of Ireland during the long 1960s exposes the myths of Ireland's modernisation. Mary E. Daly questions traditional interpretations which see these years as a time of prosperity when Irish society - led by a handful of key modernisers - abandoned many of its traditional values in its search for economic growth. Setting developments in Ireland in a wider European context, Daly shows instead that claims for the economic transformation of Ireland are hugely questionable: Ireland remained one of the poorest countries in western Europe until the end of the twentieth century. Contentious debates in later years over contraception, divorce, and national identity demonstrated continuities with the past that long survived the 1960s. Spanning the period from Ireland's economic rebirth in the 1950s to its entry into the EEC in 1973, this is a comprehensive reinterpretation of a critical period in Irish history with clear parallels for Ireland today.

Sixties Ireland: Reshaping the Economy, State and Society, 1957–1973

The spirit of earnest inquiry: The Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, 1847-1997

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Institute of Public Administration

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