Household Structure in Early Twentieth Century Ireland

Abstract

This paper aims to provide a count of households by structural type in Ireland in the early twentieth century. In doing so it addresses some of the issues which have been raised in the debate on the structure of Irish households at that time. The question of the classification of households by structural type is also addressed and attempts made to clarify some of the more ambiguous definitions. Some commonly accepted and some modified definitions are then applied to a national sample of 2,495 households drawn from the 1911 Census of Ireland. The paper concludes that the nuclear or simple household was the dominant from of household in Ireland at that time and that while the extended and multiple household certainly existed, its prevalence has largely been overstated in previous writings.