“But what hope is there for a nation which lives on potatoes?”:
A Brief History of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland

Dr Shane Whelan
UCD School of Mathematics and Statistics

Discussant: Professor Patrick Paul Walsh (UCD) on 'SSISI at 200' a forward-looking analysis of SSISI

The symposium will include contributions from:

Michelle Norris. Michelle is the director of the Geary Institute for Public Policy and Professor of Social Policy at UCD.
Stephen Purcell. Stephen is Director and Co-Head of KPMG Future Analytics (in KPMG Ireland) and is an expert in planning.
Niall Cussen. Niall is the Chief Executive and Planning Regulator at the Office of the Planning Regulator (OPR) established by Government in April 2019

The 2020 Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) marked
the first time that survey data from Irish households was supplemented with administrative data from the Central Bank’s Central Credit Register (CCR). Using household level data from the panel component of the survey, weighted to the full population in 2018, we develop a simple approach for estimating measurement error and applying it, find at least one third of households hold “revealed debt” worth almost 13 per cent of the value of total debt outstanding in 2020.

This paper examines the economic impact of Ireland’s partition, assessing market access losses using detailed geospatial data and multimodal transport network analysis. The study reveals that partition significantly reduced market access on both
sides of the border, contributing to population decline.

Regional industrial location has been a matter of intense political interest throughout the history of the state. Details of the geographic distribution of manufacturing establishments are sparse however – particularly until close to EEC accession – as reporting of the relevant data from the Census of Industrial Production (CIP) was heavily constrained by the requirement to maintain firm-level confidentiality. Data pertaining to the location of individual industries are even scarcer. Our research identifies most of the manufacturing establishments with workforces of 100 or more in 1929 and at various dates through to 1975.

The paper reviews the causes, evolution and resolution of the severe property-related macro-financial boom and bust that crippled the Irish economy 2008-13. Among the distinctive features were a blanket government guarantee of banking liabilities, a run on the national banking system financed by a supranational central bank, and a sovereign-bank funding-cost doom loop. There were missteps in both the private and official sectors, at home and abroad, as the authorities felt their way towards corrective policies that were ultimately effective.