The marked decline in European marital fertility since the mid- nineteenth century has been a topic of abiding interest to economic, social and demographic historians, who have usually regarded Ireland as an outlier the last West European country to `modernize' in this respect. In Discussion Paper No. 531, Research Fellow Cormac Gráda notes that Teitelbaum's estimates of Irish marital fertility, which indicate no significant downward shift before the 1920s, rely on a combination of contemporary birth registration and censal material. Gráda notes that shortcomings in these registration data lead to an underestimate of Irish nineteenth-century marital fertility. He presents estimates based on censal data alone which indicate that there was both an average decline of about 10% during 1881-1911 and also considerable inter-county variation. He finds that differences between rural and urban areas, religious affiliation and the emigration rate account for the bulk of inter-county variation on the eve of World War I.

Gráda also notes the relevance of the Irish case to the debate over the contributions to the fertility transition of `stopping' or `spacing', i.e. couples' practising contraception to avert further births once a target number of children had been reached or to exercise discretion over the timing of their births. Paul David and others have applied `cohort parity analysis' (CPA) a measure of fertility control that is particularly geared to measuring spacing to data on rural Ireland from the 1911 population census to derive a non- controlling bench-mark against which to measure other populations' divergences from `zero family limitation'. In particular, their application of CPA to 1911 Scottish data indicates more `spacing' than in Ireland except in marriages of very brief duration. Gráda notes that this anomalous result reveals a shortcoming of the CPA measure: when bridal pregnancy or pre-marital births are common (as they were for Scottish couples recently married in 1911), the absence of control within marriage may be misinterpreted as a lack of control before it. The results of applying further CPA to three specially constructed Irish micro-data sets suggest that there was considerable variation in the degree of `spacing' within Ireland during the 1900s. Gráda concludes that Ireland was indeed an outlier, but his results nevertheless indicate a hitherto unsuspected degree of Irish participation in the pre- 1914 European fertility transition.

New Evidence on the Fertility Transition in Ireland 1880-1911
Cormac Gráda

Discussion Paper No. 531, May 1991 (HR)