'The early censuses of Ireland and their surviving original returns' by Dr Brian Gurrin

The second talk in our online evening lecture series for 2023 was delivered by Dr Brian Gurrin, entitled ‘The early censuses of Ireland and their surviving original returns’. Brian’s lecture discussed three early censuses conducted in Ireland: the religious census of 1766, the 1813–1815 statutory census and the 1821 statutory census. All three surveys can lay claim to the title of ‘Ireland’s first census’ and although most of the returns from the five statutory censuses stored in the Public Record Office of Ireland were destroyed prior to its destruction during the Civil War in June 1922, some original returns survive from these three enumerations and it is these which were the focus of the talk. Biography: Dr Brian Gurrin is the census specialist on the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland project. He has written extensively on census taking in Ireland and is particularly interested in the demographics of Ireland’s regions in the pre-Famine period. His jointly-authored (with Kerby Miller and Liam Kennedy) volume The Irish religious censuses of the 1760s was published by the Irish Manuscripts Commission in 2022 while his jointly-authored (with Liam Kennedy, Donald MacRaild and Lewis Darwen) volume The Death Census of Black ’47: eyewitness accounts of Ireland’s Great Famine was published earlier this year.