In a speech to a Fianna Fáil celebration in Galway in 1951, Eamon de Valera deplored the conditions under which Irish migrants were living in the English Midlands—fifteen to a room, the men sleeping by night and the women by day. His talk provoked a furor in Britain—the mayor of Coventry sent a telegram of protest—but the controversy had the ironic result of causing an upsurge in applications for jobs in Britain to the Ministry of Labour liaison office in Dublin!

This nugget conveys a flavor of the wealth of detail about the economic and social development of Ireland after Independence contained in this book. As Mary Daly states, “The primary concern is at one remove from the statistical data. … This is primarily a study of opinions. … Ultimately it is a study of Irish mentalités” (17). The book displays the fruits of her extraordinary diligence in combing through official reports, departmental memos, commissions of inquiry (and the unpublished evidence they collected), parliamentary debates, diocesan archives, and national and provincial newspapers. The territory covered is familiar to those who have read Joseph Lee's and Tom Garvin's books (Tom Garvin, Preventing the Future: Why Was Ireland So Poor for So Long? [Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2004]; and Joseph Lee, Ireland, 1912–1985 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989]), but the account of the policy debate about Ireland's failure is more systematic and detailed than in previous works.

The justification for the book's gloomy title lies in the decline in the rural population of the twenty-six counties from 2 million in 1926 (the date of the first post-Independence census) to 1.4 million in 1971. While rural decline was the norm in postwar Europe, in Ireland it was combined with relatively slow urban population growth, which led to the stagnation of the total population. Indeed, at the nadir in 1961, the national population was 5 percent below its 1926 level. The mass movement from the farms and villages of Ireland to the towns and cities of England and further afield was readily generalized as a symbol of the failure of the whole project of an independent Ireland. Even if it could be argued that the rate of decline slowed after Independence—the population had shrunk by 23 percent between 1871 and 1911—Ireland's stagnation in the 1950s contrasted with the strong economic and demographic expansion in most European countries after the Second World War.

Mary Daly documents the remarkable bias toward the presumed frugal comforts and simple virtues of life on a small farm displayed by the protagonists in the debate on Irish economic policy down the years. But this rhetoric had little impact on the evolution of the Irish population. Between 1926 and 1971 the urban population rose from 943,000 to 1.6 million, while the population of the Dublin metropolitan area increased by 86 percent. Although some echoes of the antiurban bias linger in the contemporary debate on regional policy, the strength of the antagonism to urbanization and the “excessive” growth of Dublin revealed in the chapter on “Saving Rural Ireland” is nonetheless striking. There was opposition to teaching commercial subjects to rural children. It was urged that textbooks should contain a “bias towards rural life.” There were recurrent debates on how to close off the emigration option, to women in particular. While in the prosperous Ireland of the new millennium there has been a growth of nostalgie de la boue, reading detailed accounts of these ancient controversies and the tragicomic pronouncements of populist politicians, steely clerics, cautious civil servants, and assorted cranks can become numbing.

The Irish experience raised in acute form the issue: by which criterion should economic success be judged—the growth of total income or of income per person? By the second criterion the Irish record was by no means as dismal as is widely believed. Over the period covered by this book, real per capita gross domestic product more than doubled, growing at an annual average rate of about 2 percent. True, there was a long period of stagnation from 1932 to the end of the Second World War, but this could be blamed largely on external factors. The 1950s are usually regarded as a lost decade, for which domestic policy mistakes were to blame, but income per person declined in only two years—1956 and 1958—while the urban population continued to grow, albeit at a mere 0.6 percent a year. The high rate of emigration reflected mainly the rational decision of successive generations of young Irish people to seek a higher living standard outside the country. They and their children were on average better off abroad than they would have been at home—despite the horror stories of living conditions among the emigrants in Britain—while by emigrating they contributed to the rise in farm size and reduced pressure on domestic social spending. This benefited the living standards of those that remained behind.

Such arguments are, however, difficult to convey to the general public. In 1954 John O’Brien, an Irish-American priest, edited a book on the decline of the Irish population called The Vanishing Irish. As Mary Daly points out, this was richer in outrage and emotion than in analysis, but, appearing as it did when emigration was building up to crisis levels, it struck a popular chord. R. C. Geary attempted to debate the costs and benefits of emigration in a public symposium held in Dublin on the book, but his contribution was dismissed as “cynical” by one editorial writer.

Mary Daly has written a meticulously researched survey of the debate that raged around Ireland's unique population history in the early decades of Independence. Although the Ireland that emerges from these pages is one scarcely recognizable from the vantage point of a country now worried about immigration and excessively rapid growth, her book will be invaluable to students of this seminal period in Ireland's history.