ABSTRACT
The central role of ‘the family’ in Irish history, culture and society has been a longstanding concern both in the interdisciplinary arena of Irish Studies, and in the social sciences internationally. Historians, demographers, anthropologists and sociologists have investigated a wide range of issues in relation to the family in Ireland over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as: the deeply embedded relationship that existed between family, kinship and community in rural Ireland (Aransberg and Kimball 1968 [1940]); poverty and class (Prunty 1998; Daly 1989); family, gender and women’s rights (Bourke 1993; Connolly 2003; Daly 2006); illegitimacy, reproduction and fertility (Farrell 2013); infanticide (Rattigan 2011); domestic violence (Steiner-Scott 1997); childhood and child welfare (Buckley 2013); religion (Inglis 1998); sexuality (Ferriter 2009); and the distinctive demographic patterns that emerged in relation to marriage, non-marriage, fertility and emigration in the post-Famine period (Daly 1999; Guinnane 1997; Clancy 1992; Kennedy 2001; Connell 1962).
