Not Only Ireland

It is tempting to treat the Irish bachelor as something that could only have happened in Ireland. A national peculiarity, half tragic and half comic, belonging to us and to nobody else.

He was not. Late marriage was the European norm, and the single heir farm was common across half the continent.

Ireland was extreme, not unique. And the reason it was extreme is more interesting than the myth.

Late marriage was normal

West of a line running roughly from Trieste to St Petersburg, late marriage and a permanently unmarried tenth of the population had been ordinary since the sixteenth century. East of that line marriage was early and close to universal.

Ireland sat on the western side of it, with everyone else who is now thought of as normal.

The Irish figure of about one in ten never marrying before the Famine is squarely inside that range. What happened afterwards took Ireland out of the range altogether, but it started from an ordinary place.

The single heir farm had other names

Passing a holding whole to one child was not an Irish invention either. It had names across Europe.

In Austria and Bavaria it was Anerbenrecht, and it governed the Alpine farms. Norway and Sweden ran the same arrangement on mountain holdings. The French Pyrenees and the Basque country had the ostal and the etxe, the house that passes whole and takes its name with it. Galicia and northern Portugal ran comparable systems with heavy emigration attached.

Every one of those produced late marriage, excluded siblings and people who left. None of them produced Ireland.

1960. How far out Ireland was

Single women as a share of all women aged fifteen to forty four, around 1960:

Ireland 47.9 per cent. Portugal 40.6. Spain 40.3. Austria 33.8. Sweden 32.2. England and Wales 27.5.

Ireland sat a full seven points beyond the next country in Europe, and Portugal and Spain were themselves outliers.

At the same date Irish men married at 30.8 on average against a European figure of 26.7.

So the shape was European and the extremity was Irish. The question is what made the difference, and the answer is four doors that stayed open elsewhere.

1905. The first door. Children outside marriage

This is the sharpest contrast in the whole comparison.

Births outside marriage as a share of all births, around 1905:

Ireland 2.6 per cent. England and Wales 4.0. Scotland 6.7. Prussia 7.2. Sweden 12.0. Bavaria 12.4. Austria 12.8.

Now put that beside the inheritance systems. Austria and Bavaria ran the same single heir arrangement as the West of Ireland. Their excluded sons and daughters had children anyway.

In Austria, not inheriting meant not inheriting. In Ireland, not marrying meant no children at all.

That is the difference in one line, and it is why the Irish figures look the way they do. The same economic machine was running in both places. Only one of them shut off reproduction along with it.

One caution. The Irish figures understate the true level, because pregnant unmarried Irish women travelled to England and the births were registered there. [1] The gap against Austria is far too wide for that to close it.

The second door. A wage within walking distance

The excluded sons of the Alps and of Scandinavia found work in mining, forestry, quarrying, milling and later in factories. They stayed in the region and drew a wage in it.

Ireland had almost no industry outside the Lagan valley. There was no second economy for a man who did not get the farm.

A younger son in Tyrol walked down the valley. A younger son in Leitrim walked to the boat.

1826. The third door. Cottage industry

Domestic spinning underwrote early marriage in Flanders, in Saxony and in the west of Ireland alike. A wheel in the kitchen was an income that did not come out of the ground.

Mill spinning destroyed the Irish domestic trade from the middle of the 1820s, and nothing took its place. Elsewhere in Europe the proto-industrial regions moved into factory work in the same districts, or into another cottage trade.

Ireland lost the income and did not replace it. That door shut first, and it shut hardest in exactly the counties this series is about.

The fourth door. Coming back

Italian, Spanish and Scandinavian emigrants very often returned. They worked abroad for some years, saved, came home, bought land or a house, and married in the parish they were born in.

Irish emigrants went to English speaking countries, permanently. By 1881 about forty per cent of everyone born in Ireland was living somewhere else.

A man who leaves and comes back at thirty five with money is a marriage. A man who leaves and does not come back is a subtraction.

1881. The nearest parallel

The closest genuine comparison is not on the continent at all. It is the Scottish Highlands and Islands.

Crofting tenure, one successor to the croft, heavy and female weighted emigration, bachelor crofters, and parishes that emptied. Anyone looking for the Irish pattern outside Ireland should look there first.

Even there the fourth door stood half open. Scottish births outside marriage ran at 6.7 per cent against Ireland's 2.6.

So the West of Ireland was not a country apart. It was a European arrangement with every exit sealed.