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The most consequential administrative event began on 28 May, when enumerators started the first full census of Ireland. Earlier attempts at a national count had proved inadequate. This inquiry was markedly ambitious for its time: officers were instructed to proceed house by house, recording each resident’s name, age and occupation. Their notebooks also allowed for relationships within households, the number of storeys in a dwelling, acreage held by local landholders, and observations on schools. Soldiers in barracks, prisoners, infirmary patients, boarders at schools and visitors were, in principle, to be included. The census was therefore an attempt to turn an immensely varied society into legible local facts, townland by townland.
In 1817 Ireland was caught in the sharpest phase of a crisis that had begun with the bad weather and poor harvest of 1816. Cold, wet conditions had damaged the potato crop in many districts; the wider post-war slump that followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars reduced employment and purchasing power. For labourers, cottiers and smallholders whose survival depended upon a narrow margin of food, fuel, seasonal earnings and informal credit, this combination was ruinous. The year is therefore often placed within the famine-and-fever emergency of 1816–19. Yet care is needed with the word “famine”. Recent scholarship has argued that Ireland did not experience a single island-wide collapse of food supply on the later, catastrophic scale of the Great Famine. What is beyond doubt is that severe scarcity, unemployment, rising prices and disease exposed profound insecurity in both town and countryside.
