The Interwar Economy in Ireland

by David Johnson

The economic history of interwar Ireland has not generated a great deal of recent research. One reason for this may be that, compared to earlier periods, there is much less room for dispute over matter of fact. To discover what the Irish population was in, say, 1780, what the birth and death rates were, and how they changed from year to year, is a task requiring much scholarly effort and the subject has received deserved academic attention. An historian wishing to find out comparable information for the interwar period simply needs to look in the relevant volumes of the Irish Statistical Abstracts and the Ulster Year Books. Estimates for industrial and agricultural output, difficult to ascertain before the censuses of the early twentieth century, can be readily discovered in the 1930's. We know, with a reasonable degree of accuracy, the figures for imports and exports, the levels of unemployment, movements in the cost of living, the number of vehicles on the road, even how many people went to the cinema each week. In this sense then, the history of the interwar period only occasionally involves dispute about matters of fact. This leads to a second reason why so little has been written on the economic history of interwar Ireland. Most of the data on the period available to us to-day was equally accessible to contemporaries. In the Irish Free State in the 1920's and 1930's there were many well-trained, highly intelligent economists quite as capable of evaluating the increasing stream of information pouring forth from government sources as we are to-day. In Northern Ireland the situation was rather different. The economics department of Queen's University was dominated by Professor George Meredith, a 'Bloomsburyite' whose primary interest was in poetry. Neither he, nor his deputy Mr. Lemburger, ever wrote anything on contemporary economic problems. In the Free State, however, a succession of able economists, notable George O'Brien, Joseph Johnston, G.A. Duncan and James Meenan, were able to address the economic issues of the day with virtually all the required facts at their disposal. In this sense much of the economic history of interwar Ireland, particularly the Saorstat, was being written at the time. Sometimes when it has been rewritten it has not been improved upon. For example, Meenan's article on industrial policy written in 1943, is, if anything, more incisive than his treatment of the subject in 1970.

Where possible I have tried to examine the history of interwar Ireland under various general headings rather than dealing separately with Northern Ireland and the Free State. Even after partition both parts of the country had much in common, particularly with respect to agriculture and the standard of living. In this essay I have kept references to a minimum and generally, where I have not made specific citations, my information has been based on government sources such as the Statistical Abstracts and the Ulster Year Books. I would like, however, to record a special indebtedness to Professor Meenan's book (1970) mentioned above. I have derived enormous benefit from it.

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