The population of this island is approximately 7.2 million (5.35 million in the Republic and 1.91 million in Northern Ireland), still almost a million below the 8.175 million who lived here pre-Famine, according to the 1841 census. It is surely an indication of the trauma our people suffered then that 183 years later our population has yet to catch up to where it was then.
Between 1841 and 1851 the population dropped by almost 20 per cent – to 6.5 million in the island as a whole, with a further 11 per cent drop between 1851 and 1861. By 1931 it was down to 4.21 million, or almost half what it was 90 years earlier.
Looking at my own county, in 1841 there were 253,591 people in Roscommon. Within 20 years that was down to 157,000 (in 1861). The drop continued for another 155 years, until 1996, when the county’s population was about 52,000 people or, roughly, 20 per cent of what it had been in 1841.
Roscommon experienced a drop of about 72 per cent in its pre-Famine population, with only Leitrim faring worse, where the drop to current times was 77 per cent, from 155,297 in 1841.
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Since when the trend has reversed in Roscommon so that in the 26 years afterwards, up to the census of 2022, our county’s population had grown to 69,995.
The Republic reached its nadir, population-wise, in 1961 when there were just 2,818,000 people left out of a 1841 population of 6.53 million.
In Sligo, the county’s pre-Famine population of 180,866 dropped by 61 per cent.
Interviewed for the short-lived Dublin-based Sunday Review newspaper in 1962, small farmer John Joe Walsh (86) of Aclare, Co Sligo, explained how, to combat the loneliness when his first wife died and all their 11 children had emigrated to England and America, he decided to start again.
He married 16-year-old Anastasia Best in 1940, and they had 11 children as well. Nursing his then six-week-old daughter Geraldine, he told the newspaper: “I like to have children around me and God has spared me to bring them into the world.”
Population, from Latin populus, for ‘people’.
