Above : Maynooth College, Founded In This Period

The population of Ireland at the time of the passing of the Act of Union is estimated as something between 40 and 45 millions. In spite of the wave of relative prosperity which marked the closing decades of the eighteenth century, there was much poverty, both in the urban and in the rural districts. The land laws, in many of their worst features, remained still unreformed, but long leases or freeholds could now be given to Catholics. A freehold of 40s. in annual value conferred the franchise on its possessor, and as Catholics were now (since 1793) voters, astute landlords considered it their interest to increase their own political weight by the multiplication of such tenures.

There was a good deal of tillage, and corn continued to be exported, till the abolition of the corn-laws in the ‘forties produced its effect. The dead-meat trade and its subsidiary industries, such as tanning, as well as dairy-farming, occupied many. The casual worker, whether in town or country, suffered much from unemployment. During the winter especially there was, of course, little farm work. As the century advanced, the town artisan found the struggle for existence rendered harder and harder by the increasing pressure of population, and consequently of competition. No laws were in existence to protect him from the rapacity of employers in regard to hours, conditions of work or wages. Combinations of workmen for their mutual protection were illegal.

The Catholics were no longer a negligible factor in public life. They had begun, with ever-increasing boldness, to demand their rights. Though little hampered now in their private affairs they were still excluded from practically all important offices. In some cases as in that of membership of Parliament, mayoralties, privy councillorhips, etc., what was practically a positive law shut them out ; in others their exclusion was merely a matter of custom Education. In some of the larger cities, as notably in Dublin and Cork, Catholic poor schools had been founded, which were attended by great numbers of scholars and seem to have been generally very well managed. Rural education remained, in fact, much the same as it had been in the darkest days of the penal laws ; although it was now more diffused and was permitted by the law, instead of being merely connived at. Little or no attention was paid in the schools to the cultivation of the native tongue; nor was the case better in the new college of Maynooth. In the towns Catholic primary schools, mostly under the management of clerics, began to be founded. In 1814, the Jesuits opened Clongowe Wood, the first exclusively lay secondary school for boys in Ireland since the penal times. Maynooth College (founded 1796 with a State endowment of £8,000 a year) was primarily intended for the education of the clergy. Catholic girls were still, as earlier, generally educated by governesses at home, or in convents.

A goodly number of schools, such as the Royal Schools, Erasmus Smith’s School, and others, many of them dating from the seventeenth century, continued to provide for the needs of the members of the Established Church. Trinity College, Dublin, remained, till the ‘forties, the only University in Ireland.