Life, death, and Irish statistics: Recovering Ireland's civil registration statistics, 1864-1920

Civil registration of vital statistics was introduced in Ireland in 1864, yet historians have often viewed the resulting data as unreliable due to weak incentives for compliance and uneven administrative capacity. This paper reassesses the performance of Ireland's vital registration system by tracing its legal origins, documenting its institutional development, and re-evaluating its demographic accuracy. We show that the primary motivation for establishing civil registration was the protection of property rights, which shaped both the design of the system and the incentives facing registrars. New evidence on legal utilisation demonstrates that recourse to records of vital registration increased steadily and converged with usage rates in Britain, suggesting growing engagement with an expanding bureaucratic state in Ireland. Revisiting longstanding comparisons between registered vital events and decadal census enumerations, we find that death registration was generally robust and that irregularities in birth registration are considerably smaller than earlier studies imply. These results indicate that Irish civil registration is more reliable, and more suitable for empirical research, than the prevailing consensus suggests. Revised age-standardised mortality estimates further show that, once demographic structure is accounted for, Ireland's mortality trajectory was distinctive but not exceptional in comparative perspective.