High emigration and a low marriage rate caused population to fall to slightly more than half its 1841 level by 1901. Throughout these years schools, churches, shops, post offices and railways modernised rural and urban Ireland. The Irish Republican Brotherhood/Fenians rising of the 1860s, though unsuccessful, focused attention on Irish grievances. However, the land agitation 1879–1891 was led by parliamentary nationalists, the Home Rule party under Parnell, and managed to convert the British Liberal party under William Gladstone to this cause in 1886. Unionists all over the country resisted, but their campaign was concentrated more in the north-east, where unionist sympathies existed at all social levels. By 1903 landlordism had been abolished but the nationalist-unionist struggle was only beginning.

Shipbuilding and textile/garment industries were huge employers in the north-east. Elsewhere food-processing, textile/apparel, and mining and quarrying, held their own but did not expand. Agriculture was the biggest single employer. The rise in white-collar and government jobs for the sons and daughters of the small farming and working class offered the greatest opportunity for social mobility in this period. English was needed for employment, education, and emigration, and the Irish language declined further.