ABSTRACT
Services constitute all forms of economic activity that are not concerned with the production of physical output. Although this diverse range of activities accounted for just over a third of total employment in the economy in the 1920s, being much more important in this regard than industry, agricultural employment was still far more significant than service employment at that point. The services share has consistently expanded since then, with the exception of the 1950s, while conversely agricultural employment has experienced decline; by the 1980s services accounted for just over 51 per cent of total employment. By 2009, with over 74 per cent of the occupied workforce in services (see Table 9.1), the great bulk of employment in the Republic of Ireland economy was now in services, thus broadly following the historical pattern in most of western Europe, if at a somewhat slower pace. This chapter provides a historical survey of this highly eclectic range of economic activity on a sectoral basis, as opposed to the more chronological treatment followed in Chapters 3 and 4. This approach has been taken in order to capture both the wide spectrum of activity across the services sector as a whole and the central importance that services have assumed in the economy since independence, which has not always been fully recognized or appreciated by policy makers, economists and economic historians, who until recently have tended to attach far greater significance to industry and agriculture.
