Abstract
This chapter addresses the central issue of the book – the transformation of Ireland from a young and growing country to one that shrank and grew old. The critical impact of the Famine is noted and the subsequent decline and ageing of the country during the period 1851–1901. Also noted is the marked variation in rates of ageing between the major metropolises of Belfast in the North and Dublin in the South, where the population scarcely aged and the rural counties where ageing was more pronounced. The critical role played by the loss of a generation during the Famine decade is highlighted.
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Notes
- 1.
Freeman’s Journal Saturday December 7, 1822, vol. 6, no. 40, p. 1.
- 2.
See Appendix 2 for details of the census samples used in this study and Chapter 3 for the full details of the findings.
- 3.
See Census of Ireland, 1841. Report of the Commissioners, Vital Statistics, p. xlvi.
- 4.
Ages were not recorded in the 1831 Irish census.
- 5.
Choosing age 60 as the boundary of old age reflects the situation in Ireland in the nineteenth century; there is no assumption that this represents a constant since any chronological boundary for ‘old age’ is inherently contingent on time and place (see Bourdelais 1999).
- 6.
As noted, age 60 and above has been taken as the chronological marker of old age for Ireland in the nineteenth century. It was the age when most men were deemed ‘too old to labour’ (see Chapter 4) and it provides the most consistent way of avoiding the otherwise problematic characteristic of age heaping when most men and women in their 60s were allocated age 60 rather than any other 60-something age, including age 65.
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Gilleard, C. (2017). Ireland’s Changing Demography. In: Old Age in Nineteenth-Century Ireland. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58541-7_2
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