The series made available here were originally put online in the mid-2000s by the Historical National Accounts Group for Ireland (HNAG).
Wages and earnings of Agricultural Labourers, 1850-1905
These files contain Irish wage data from 1850 to 1905, as reported in the Board of Trade.
Wages, 1897-1906
The files contain records of wages for various occupations between 1896 and 1906, as reported in the British Parliamentary Papers and Thom’s Official Directory of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, 1903. The occupations listed include those in the utilities, transport, textile industry, construction, services, and public sector.
xlsx (zip file), csv (zip file)
Second report by Wilson Fox
The second report by Mr. Wilson Fox on the wages, earnings and conditions of employment of agricultural labourers in the United Kingdom, with statistical charts and tables, 1905.
xlsx (zip file), csv (zip file), pdf
About HNAG
HNAG was founded by Kieran Kennedy in 1994 and has been a nexus for scholars and professionals interested in Irish economic history. Meeting initially at the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) in Dublin, the group later migrated to Trinity College Dublin, where it evolved into the Irish Quantitative History group (IQH) that stills meets annually in January each year in Trinity.
Comprising academics, researchers and public sector representatives, HNAG’s original mission was to develop comprehensive statistics on Irish economic growth from the Famine to the First World War; those interested in that initial mission are encouraged to read Andersson & Lennard (2019). Since the inception of HNAG, the group produced outputs including symposiums, working papers, and data series on Irish economic history. With Kieran Kennedy at the helm, the group’s efforts significantly contributed to the exploration and understanding of Ireland’s economic past. One of their outputs was a digital data depository, created by Jason Begley, Frank Geary, and Kevin O’Rourke.
Regrettably, the data made available online by HNAG, and which were stored on TCD servers, were lost in the mid-2010s. With the support of the Royal Irish Academy (RIA), through a 2023 Nowlan Digitisation Grant, for which we are very grateful, it has been possible to restore the HNAG data series. In addition to the financial support of the RIA, we also benefited hugely from the cooperation of those involved in HNAG and the IQH. These valuable datasets are now hosted on the CEPH website, ensuring broad accessibility and visibility for researchers and the general public.