Britain was a saviour for Irish migrants. One of those sons will captain England next week

They say that sporting talent is in the genes. Could it be that Harry Kane – the man who will captain England in next week’s World Cup – got his sporting ability from his great great grandfather, an agricultural labourer called Jim Flood who won an All-Ireland for Limerick in 1897 before dying of Spanish flu in 1918?

Kane’s grandmother, Theresa Fitzgerald, left rural Limerick for London in the 1950s, where she married Harry’s grandfather, Michael John Kane, who’d left Letterfrack, Co Galway, around the same time.

When he leads out the Three Lions for their first game against Croatia, Kane will be yet another member of the great Irish tribe leaving a mark on the country that took in their forefathers. If emigrant success is doing well in the new country, then Kane epitomises that dream.

In the 1950s, half a million people left this country with similar ambitions, the vast majority bound for England. Digging around in various censuses, it’s a delight to find the grandfathers and great grandfathers of today’s diaspora. For example, the census tells us that in 1926, a man called William Sweeney was living in Kilglass, Co Sligo. An agricultural labourer described as “not yet at work”, he would have been expected to work on the farm. It’s a long way to Wembley Stadium where his two great grandsons, Noel and Liam Gallagher, finished their record-breaking world tour last October.

Looking back at the economic history of this country through the prism of the treasure trove that is the 1926 census, the main fact that emerges is the extraordinary movement of our ancestors – all those suitcases, mail boats, long goodbyes, letters home, Irish dances in Irish areas of Coventry, London and Manchester, broken families, new families, dreams, new beginnings.

Today, Harry Kane and Oasis are regarded as quintessentially English, as are the Sex Pistols, the Beatles, Boy George, Caroline Aherne, Kate Bush, Peter Kay, Dusty Springfield, and the woman who carried the mace and stole the show at King Charles’ coronation, conservative politician, Penny Mordaunt. One thing they all have in common is that they are a fusion, described by Morrissey as “Irish Blood, English Heart”.

The story of the 1926 census is a snapshot of a society in the middle of demographic trauma, termed in economics a “Malthusian trap” – after Thomas Malthus, who argued that humans are locked into a battle with nature and nature always wins. After a catastrophe like the Famine, we react by what Malthus described as “positive checks”. We change our behaviour to avoid a repeat of the tragedy, by emigration, fewer families, later marriages.

In 1926, Ireland was still in this Malthusian trap. Looking at the meticulous handwriting of the first parents of this State, annotating carefully the names of their young children, you can’t help wondering if they had any idea how many of their children would leave. Yes, we had a new country, but we still had the same old problems.

By 1961, it is estimated that 45 per cent of all those born in Ireland between 1926 and 1936 had left. By the early 1950s, almost three-fifths of men and three-quarters of women who emigrated to Britain were aged 16-24. From 1946-56, a total of 320,000 emigrated. These were the first children of the Free State; as many as 40 per cent of the class of 1926 and the subsequent years ended up living abroad. That is a remarkably depressing statistic. However, when you examine what was happening in the Irish economy in the early 20th century, the mass flight from the country is not too hard to understand.

The population had been falling continuously since the Famine of the 1840s – from 6.5 million in the 26 counties to under 3 million. The turmoil of the Rising, the War of Independence, the Civil War, and the movement of Protestants out of the jurisdiction, continued to drive the population downwards. Between the 1911 and 1926 censuses, the population contracted from 3,139,688 to 2,971,000. In a Europe of constantly rising populations, Ireland’s demographic experience was an extreme outlier, one driven by high emigration, high infant mortality, extremely low marriage rates and the powerful economic logic of farm inheritance by which the oldest son got everything, leaving little for the other children.

Ireland had the highest proportion of unmarried men and women in Europe. And yet, despite the lowest rate of married women under 45 of any comparable country – only 74 per 1,000 versus 121 in England and Wales and 142 in the US – the Irish women who were married had by far the highest fertility rates, with 131 births per 1,000 versus 77 in the US and 71 in England and Wales. The fertility rate index (taking 1925-27 as 100) reveals Ireland at 100, Northern Ireland at 84.6, Scotland at 67.8, and England and Wales at 51. This means married Irish women were having almost twice the number of children as their English counterparts.

The workforce of about 1.3 million was overwhelmingly male and predominantly agricultural. More than half of these workers were in farming, and in counties Leitrim, Mayo and Roscommon that figure was above 80 per cent. The farm was very much a family affair and unpaid family labour was endemic. About 206,000 sons and daughters were assisting on family farms, with a further 57,000 other relatives recorded working the land too, many given food and board, earning almost nothing. The rapid switch from tillage, which requires many hands, to dairy, which demands fewer, meant that farm employment was shrinking – and there wasn’t much else going on.

Policy-wise, Ireland’s new government relied on exporting live cattle to the UK. The only comparative advantage was lower Irish costs, which meant lower farm wages. Even if you had a job on the land, your earnings were miserly, and the whole economic strategy was to keep them that way, due to the inherent conservative nature of economic policy. The Cumann na nGaedheal government were, in the words of justice minister Kevin O’Higgins, “the most conservative revolutionaries that ever put through a successful revolution”. National income stood at £164 million in 1926. The Civil War cost a minimum of £50 million, equivalent to 32 per cent of national output. The economy was finely balanced and fear of default meant constant capital flight. The government decided to maintain a fixed currency with Sterling; therefore movements of money in and out of the country had to be carefully monitored, leading to extreme budgetary caution.

GDP per capita was approximately 60 per cent of Britain’s, and one in seven of the population was rural, living on small agricultural holdings, modest cottages on often poor and scattered land, isolated but rarely overcrowded. In contrast, urban households were twice as likely to be overcrowded. In Dublin alone, 23,655 families lived in single-room tenements. This is the stuff of Séan O’Casey’s plays. Unemployment was rife and opportunity minimal, which is hardly surprising when you think that 30 per cent of industrial output was brewing. In 1926, Ireland had only two dozen or so manufacturing firms with a workforce of 400 or more. Two-thirds of those were located in Dublin and 98 per cent of exports went to Britain.

Ireland was almost totally without industry, capital and economic ideas. Within a few years, the citizens of this new country would be rocked by the Great Depression and, with America largely closed to emigrants, Britain, the old enemy, became a sort of saviour for hundreds of thousands of migrants. One of those sons will captain England next week. What odds would Harry Kane’s great great grandfather, All-Ireland winner Jim Flood, have given that fairytale?