Extract from the article:- Statistics of Irish Prosperity
At the risk of making this paper dry to many readers, as
concise a resume as may be possible will be made of the
emigrational and agricultural statistics of the past six or
eight years, which suggest many valuable, and to the practical
mind, highly interesting reflections.
In as much as the Statistics of Emigration are a key to
certain parts of the agricultural tables, which would
otherwise be inexplicable, it may, first, come under notice
to what extent the rural labouring population and the
tenant-farmer class have suffered by the Exode, as it is
still commonly termed in Ireland. On the 30th March, 1851,
according to the Census of that year, there were in this
country, 6,552,385 persons, thus distributed over the
provinces:- Leinster, 1,672,738; Munster, 1,857,736; Ulster,
2,011,880; and Connaught, 1,010,031. Mr. Donnelly's (the
Registrar-General,) most valuable and trustworthy tables,
show the total emigration, year by year, since that period:-
EMIGRATION FROM IRISH PORTS
1851, . . 179,507
1852, . . 190,322
1853, . . 173,148
1854, . . 140,555
1855, . . 91,914
1856, . . 90,781
1857, . . 95,081
There is no regular registration of births and deaths in
Ireland, so that if in one branch of statistical science, the
agricultural, we are in advance of England in our
arrangements, our neighbours are before us in another.
Mr. Donnelly has attempted to arrive at an approximation in
reference to births and deaths in Ireland, by an average of
sixteen years on the reports of Mr. Graham, the English
Registrar-General. Taking the births as 1 in 31, and the
deaths as 1 in 45, and setting off the difference against the
totals of the yearly emigration, he establishes that since
1851, there has been a steady decline of the population,
which, making due allowance for the small emigration that has
taken place, leaves the total estimated population of Ireland
on the 1st of January 1858, somewhere about six millions, or
above half a million less than at the time of the Census in
1851, while during those seven years, nearly a million
individuals have emigrated. The exode has operated all over
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the country, but chiefly in the counties of Kerry, Cork,
Tipperary, Clare and Limerick, at least, after the
metropolitan county, in Mayo and Sligo. It has also to a
great extent, been an emigration of adults, the proportion
per cent. between the ages of 15 and 25 being 49.1; between
25 and 35, 22.4; and between 35 and 45, 7.7. There is good
reason to conclude, although such a fact could not be set out
by statistics, that the majority of the emigrants consisted
of rather comfortable tenant-farmers and their families.
