This short paper revisits two questions that were central to Joel Mokyr’s Why Ireland Starved (2nd edition, 1985). These are, first, what determined the variation in population change across Ireland during the Great Famine decade of 1841-1851 and, second, whether and in what sense can...

In most western societies, marital fertility began to decline in the nineteenth century. But in Ireland, fertility in marriage remained stubbornly high into the twentieth century. Explanations of this focus on the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in Irish society. These arguments are often...

Ireland’s relatively late and feeble fertility transition remains poorly-understood. The leading explanations stress the role of Catholicism and a conservative social ethos. Previous studies rely on evidence that is not sufficient to support firm conclusions. This paper reports the first...

This paper complements a much larger study of school attendance in pre-famine Ireland by FitzGerald (2010). It exploits some of the data generated by that study to analyze further some of the determinants of schooling and literacy in the 1820s and 1840s.

This paper describes Ireland last major bank failure before the collapse of Anglo-Irish Bank in 2008. It points to resonances between that earlier failure and the events that led to the downfall of Ireland's banking system in 2008-2010.

The paper places Ireland's current economic crisis in historical perspective. It compares it with four others since independence: those of 1934-38, 1939-45, the 1950s, and the 1980s. The present crisis is arguably the gravest of the five.

Very little is known about wealth-holding and its distribution in Ireland in the past. Here we employ death duty register data to analyse and identify a sample of the top wealth holders in Ireland between the early 1820s and late 1830s. We examine the sources of their wealth and its regional...

The successful assimilation of ethnic minorities into Western economies is one of the biggest challenges facing the Modern World. The substantial flows of Irish, to England, provide an historical example of this process. However, this has received surprisingly little scholarly attention. We use...

Very little is known about wealth-holding and its distribution in Ireland in the past. Here we employ death duty register data to analyse and identify a sample of the top wealth holders in Ireland between the early 1820s and late 1830s. We examine the sources of their wealth and its regional...