Census centenary - Striking similarities 100 years on

IF you think things are bad now, consider what it was like in the Ireland of a hundred years ago when the 1911 Census was compiled.

As one might expect, stark contrasts are thrown up by this fascinating precursor to next Sunday’s Census — but a century later the similarities are even more striking.

In the first decade of the 20th century, poverty was rampant, jobs just as scarce as today, and then as now Ireland’s sovereignty was not in the hands of the Irish people.

As reflected in today’s in-depth analysis of social and religious trends from the snapshot 1911 Census, times were very hard. The results include such key factors as employment rates, marital status, literacy, mortality rates plus a wealth of other illuminating data.

Poignantly, the biggest contrast is the appalling level of child mortality ravaging Cork, Dublin and Belfast, with a toll of more than 50% in tenements where whole families lived in one room.

So deep was the haemorrhage of emigration after the end of the Great Famine of the 1840s that more than 550,000 Cork people had emigrated by 1911. In Kerry too, despite the growth of tourism, the realities of poverty and emigration were inescapable. The contrasts between urban and rural, rich and poor were as marked then as they are today.

Census 2011 will also come too late for tens of thousands of young Irish people forced to emigrate in search of work. With nearly 400,000 people currently unemployed, echoes of 19th century tenements ring in the minds of thousands of distressed mortgage holders facing eviction in the courts today.

On the cusp of the 20th century, Britain ruled Ireland and sovereignty was but a dream. In 2011 the prize of Irish sovereignty has effectively been forfeit to the IMF and European Central Bank, leaving taxpayers with an impossible burden of €70 billion to fund a dysfunctional banking system virtually owned by the state.

With political correctness in vogue today, the language of the Census no longer includes designations like “deaf, dumb, blind, idiot, imbecile and lunatic”. But language continues to undergo change today and terms such as bond holders, stress tests, sovereign default, burden sharing, and celebrity economists are now part of our vocabulary.

Just as Ireland’s economy was depleted by Britain in 2011, the Irish people are today being squeezed mercilessly by Europe where bond holders get off free despite gambling on the raw greed of Irish bankers and developers. The honeymoon over, the new Government is widely perceived as reneging on pledges to burn bond holders.

To lay the ghost of 1911, the Fine Gael-Labour Coalition must secure a more favourable deal than the crucifix constructed by the inept Fianna Fáil-led administration, renew membership of the EU club on friendlier terms and re-commit Ireland’s loyalty to the European ideal.