With great fanfare, we now know what was in the 1926 Census but, like many censuses, we don’t know what’s not in it!
That is a known unknown, and of course that will always be so, but it’s useful to realise that it is not the full picture. All censuses take place in a political context: they can only be carried out by a government that has the trust of the people, and the quality of the result depends on the level of that trust.
The census we are discussing should have been held in 1921: and the necessary trust was clearly missing at that point.
But how much trust existed between the counters and the counted in 1926?
This was just three years after the Free State Government had militarily defeated those who did not accept its legitimacy on account of it being a Dominion, rather than the Republic that existed and had been voted and fought for—but which had been betrayed and destroyed by the the Government then in situ.
There is plenty anecdotal evidence that some of the opponents of the Treaty, who had been defeated by the Free State, did not participate in the census on principle—because the Government was held to be illegitimate. All would agree that the feelings generated by that conflict were ever present at the time of the census, as they were for decades afterwards.
These feelings were so strong that in a General Election held in June 1927, the parties who rejected the legitimacy of the state gained 49 seats in the Dáil, while the Government party obtained 47 seats. This indicates how much distrust there was of the Government a year after the census!
Also, as trust is essential in the process for all censuses, the enumerators appointed to conduct this census were about the most inappropriate part of the state for such a task—its police force! There was one arm of the state that is even less appropriate for such a task—which is its tax inspectors: these had been used in the 1821 and 1831 census under British rule. It does not take much imagination to see the inadequacy of such people for the task!
The police were first used for the 1841 Census when trust between the Government and the people was at a pretty low level to put it mildly. Apart from being a foreign force, the Tithe War of the previous decades had alone ensured this state of affairs. Contemporary accounts show that the Census was treated like a plague—and even Repealers fled to the hills to avoid any contact with the official enumerators—they being the local police! People treated it as an Intelligence-gathering exercise for the State—which is exactly what it was.
Many in Dublin feared the Census was a prelude to press ganging for British armed forces, and boarded up their houses on the day.
The language used, English, was alien to many and the concept of what constituted a family was also alien: as it assumed a nuclear family as the norm, whereas extended families were the norm. Indeed they formed mini-communities in many cases, which meant that they could not easily be categorised or defined, according the formal requirements of the census criteria.
On tope of all that, it was carried out on a Sunday, a day for fun and enjoyment—not then a suitable day for filling out intrusive forms for the Government of the day!
Naturally the result was so inadequate that the final figures showed a declining population growth rate in the previous decade. The dogs in the street would know this was farcical, as there was no reason whatever for such a phenomenon, au contraire in fact!
It also dawned on the Commissioners in charge that the Census as it stood would be ridiculed, so they amended the returns by adding an arbitrary figure of about half a million, to make it look credible! A contrived result.
What makes that Census even more ridiculous is that it is used as the baseline for estimating the dead of the Irish holocaust of the late 1840s. Most commentators take the contrived 1841 figure as an accurate record of the population, not only for 1841, but for 1847—as if the Irish stopped procreating for 6 years!
In fact, the population was increasing rapidly because of the systematic and deliberate breaking down of the traditional Gaelic society, since the so-called Glorious Revolution. This meant the destruction of the natural social order of restraints and controls which had sustained it for millennia.
The result of this breaking up of social norms with a reckless land system that encouraged extreme sub-letting of land by a host of middlemen tended to promote a very imprudent approach to procreation—aided by the abundant nutritious and aphrodisiacal qualities of the potato, and by the blithe nature of the society—in which a high regard for the enjoyment of children was an integral part, one of the “joys of life”, and “the more the merrier”.
In 1827 César Moreau, an acclaimed statistician, estimated a possible Irish population then of 9 million. If previous rates of growth, and population estimates across the earlier part of the century are assumed to have continued until 1847—which is undoubtedly was the case—there is every reason to believe that the population figure for 1847 could be estimated at about 12 million.
Of course this figure can only be an estimate, as the population was not counted in 1847—and neither were the unknowable millions that perished of hunger in a land full of food—food the export of which was ensured during this holocaust by armed escort by 67 of the 126 regiments of the of the British Army, commanded by General Blakeney. He explained that preventing starving people from seizing the food grown locally and being sent abroad was their main job: and he was knighted for his services!
His achievement entitled the operation to be described as a holocaust, sanctified by the new British ideology of compulsory Free Trade —a shibboleth for which Ireland was sacrificed: and, for good measure, God was invoked as playing a major complementary role by Sir Charles Trevelyan, the British civil servant who had the lead role and who was effectively in charge of the country.
This made it a truer holocaust than the later strictly secular holocausts.
This phenomena of people not cooperating with the state on census-taking is not unique, and not a thing of the past. The British Census of 1981 is unreliable because of popular distrust in the Government of the day. It coincided with Thatcher’s ‘Poll Tax’ and, as an enumerator, I found large numbers would not complete it for the simple reason that they believed the Government could have access to the information, and therefore that their Council Tax bills could escalate enormously.
One does not need much imagination to acknowledge the sheer impossibility of taking a realistic census in more and more states in the world today, because of this same popular distrust—to put it mildly—in governments. Just try to imagine Israel taking a census in Palestine!
Treat any census return with caution!
Jack Lane
