The Emigrant Decade

1950s: The independent state nearly emptied. By 1961 there were fewer people living in Ireland than at any point before or since.

Between 1926 and 1951 the population of the state held steady at a little under three million. Then it fell. By 1961 it was 2.8 million, the lowest figure ever recorded, and the reason was that people were leaving faster than they were being born.

Net emigration ran at about 35,000 a year in 1951 and reached roughly 58,000 in 1958. Across the decade somewhere near 400,000 people left on a net basis, and perhaps half a million in gross terms. Put beside a population under three million, that is close to one person in seven.

They went mostly to Britain rather than America this time, to building sites in Birmingham and London and to hospitals and factories across the midlands of England. Whole parishes in the west lost their young people in a decade. The cause was not famine or eviction but the slow collapse of work on the land, and an economy that had spent thirty years trying to be self sufficient behind tariff walls and had run out of road.

The turn came from an unlikely quarter: a civil servant. T. K. Whitaker, secretary of the Department of Finance, published Economic Development in 1958, arguing for free trade, foreign investment and an end to protectionism. Seán Lemass, who became Taoiseach the following year, backed it. Emigration eased through the 1960s and the population began to climb again, and it has never since fallen back to where it stood in 1961.