The 1926 census has been keeping me up late on recent nights. Browsing through the astonishing detail of how we lived when the country was only a few years old is endlessly fascinating.
The young “Free State” was very dependent on farming, that’s for sure.
No fewer than 648,575 people were occupied in agriculture 100 years ago, as most work was still done by hand.
Of those, almost one in five – 122,081 – were women.
That was half the entire workforce at the time, with 1.3m “12 years of age and over” working, from the country’s almost three million people.
The concentration was firmly west of the Shannon – every Connacht county had more people working in farming than any Leinster county bar Wexford, while Longford came second among Leinster counties.
Nationally, over half the workforce, 53% to be exact, were engaged in agriculture. In Connacht, that figure rose to 78%.
The three Ulster counties weren’t far behind, while Munster was bang on the national average.
Leinster saw a similar picture outside Dublin, but the capital’s inclusion shrank the provincial average to one in three.
No less than 10,000 people described themselves as “horse vehicle drivers”.
No diesel needed there, just a handful of nuts and an armful of hay.
SHARING OPTIONS