How It Ended

It did not fade. It broke, and it broke inside about ten years.

Something that had been getting worse since the 1870s and had gone on getting worse through independence, through the Economic War and through the Emergency, reversed in a single decade and did not come back.

The date it finished is 1973, and the date matters more than anything else in this article, because it rules out the explanation everybody reaches for.

1961. The bottom

Take the measure of how bad it had become.

Net emigration ran at 24,000 a year between 1946 and 1951, at 39,000 between 1951 and 1956, and at 42,000 between 1956 and 1961. About 405,000 people left across the decade, from a country of under three million.

The population of the state fell to 2.8 million in 1961, the lowest figure ever recorded.

In rural Ireland that year there were 244 single men for every 100 single women aged forty five to fifty four.

And the counties were still falling. Every one of the eight western counties lost people at every census between 1841 and 1961, without a single reversal. Leitrim had gone from 155,297 people to 33,470.

1954. The state looks at it

The Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems met 115 times and reported in 1954, and its findings are worth having in its own words.

Holdings were too small to support a home, so men waited. The Commission called the result an attitude towards marriage which may be described as one of undue caution.

It found that rural women, particularly in the congested districts of the west, had almost no employment, which made emigration attractive even against the prospect of marriage at home.

And it identified the feedback that kept the whole thing turning: the intention to emigrate, formed early, itself kept the marriage rate low. A young person who expects to leave does not court.

One finding is worth quoting because of what this series has argued throughout. The Commission examined the suggestion that Catholic teaching on marriage was deterring people from it, and reported that no convincing evidence had been put before it. [1]

1958. A wage within reach of home

Economic Development was published in November 1958, and the First Programme for Economic Expansion followed in 1959. Protection gave way to free trade and to foreign investment, and industrial employment began to grow.

What that meant in a parish is simple. For the first time a man could take a wage inside daily travel of the house he was born in.

He no longer had to wait for his father to hand over a farm in order to have an income. The single most powerful thing in the whole arrangement, the father's control of the only living available, stopped being the only living available.

Everything else follows from that.

1946. The house becomes a house

The rural electrification scheme began in 1946 and worked its way across the country parish by parish for three decades.

Piped water in households went from about 39 per cent in 1946 to 99.9 per cent by 1991. A fixed bath or shower went from 15 per cent to 94. Flush toilets went from 255,000 households to 970,000.

And the county council cottage gave a couple a house that was not the farmhouse, which meant a marriage did not need a handover at all.

These are not romantic facts. They are the difference between a house a woman would come into and a house she would not.

The parish stops being the marriage market

Under the old arrangement the marriage market was one parish, and a small parish under a single heir system produces very few possible matches. That is a mathematical problem before it is a social one.

The motorbike, and then the car, made the market twenty parishes instead of one.

Telephone lines went from 43,000 in 1949, only a third of them residential, to 1,427,000 by 1997. Television opened at the end of 1961 and passed 500,000 licences by 1972.

A young person in Leitrim in 1965 could see how people lived elsewhere, could travel to a dance thirty miles away, and could ring somebody afterwards. None of those three things had been true in 1945.

1973. The dates rule out the usual answer

The marriage rate reached 7.4 per thousand in 1973, the highest ever recorded to that date, up from 5.4 in the late 1950s.

Ireland joined the EEC on the first of January 1973. The farm retirement scheme came in 1974.

Neither of those can have caused a recovery that was already finished.

This is the argument of the article, and it is a matter of arithmetic rather than of interpretation. The recovery was complete before Common Agricultural Policy money reached an Irish farm gate in any quantity, and before a single farmer took a retirement pension.

What did it was the decade before. Wages, electricity, water, the cottage and the car. Ordinary infrastructure, arriving in the right order, in one decade.

The farm stopped being the only way to make a home. The moment it did, people married.

1971. What was left

The men who were already fifty in 1965 did not benefit. The arrangement had taken their lives and the reprieve came too late for them, and they lived on in the houses they had never inherited in time to use.

The figures show it. Never married men aged forty five to fifty four stood at 28 per cent in 1971, still. Among farmers and farm labourers it was above 40.

The last generation of the old system was alive and in the fields all through the years when the new one was making the country young again. That is worth remembering, because the statistics turn at 1973 and the people did not.

A note on measuring it today

One caution for anyone who goes looking at modern census figures for a trace of this.

Crude figures for single people by county mislead badly. In 2016 the highest shares of single people were Galway at 53.3 per cent, Dublin at 53.2 and Cork at 51.9, and the lowest were Leitrim at 35.8, Roscommon at 36.0 and Meath at 36.3.

That is the exact opposite of the historical pattern, and it is an artefact. Cities are full of young people who have not married yet.

The measure that shows the real thing is men aged forty five to sixty four who have never married, taken by county. [2]