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Taxation, Politics, and Protest in Ireland, 1662–2016 pp 1–17Cite as

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Introduction

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Abstract

This introductory chapter reviews the historiography of Irish taxation, summarises the chapters in the anthology, and identifies directions for future research. It emphasises the centrality of taxation to Irish politics since the seventeenth century, when Ireland began to make the transition from a ‘demesne state’—featuring low levels of taxation, decentralised decision making, and privatised methods of revenue collection—to a modern ‘tax state’—characterised by high levels of extraction, centralised policymaking, the bureaucratisation of revenue collection, and the employment of sophisticated financial instruments to facilitate deficit spending. From that time to the present, fiscal policy has shaped the Irish state, informed Irish national identity, and influenced Irish economic activity, electoral preferences, and conceptions of civic morality. Taxation has also served as a node, bringing Irish subjects/citizens into persistent contact with the state and colouring the relationship between taxpayers and their government (whether based in Dublin, London, or Belfast). As such, it has invited conflict as well as compliance.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Niamh Hardiman and Aidan Regan, ‘The Politics of Austerity in Ireland’, Intereconomics 48, no. 1 (2013): 9–14; Siobhan O’Sullivan, Amy Erbe Healy, and Michael J. Breen, ‘Political Legitimacy in Ireland During Economic Crisis: Insights from the European Social Survey’, Irish Political Studies 29, no. 4 (2014): 547–72; William K. Roche, Philip J. O’Connell, and Andrea Prothero, eds., Austerity and Recovery in Ireland: Europe’s Poster Child and the Great Recession (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

  2. 2.

    Conor McCabe, ‘The Radical Left in Ireland’, Socialism and Democracy 29, no. 3 (2015): 158–65; Rory Hearne, ‘The Irish Water War’, Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements 7, no. 1 (2015): 309–21; Richard Layte and David Landy, ‘Explaining the Belated Emergence of Social Protest in Ireland between 2009 and 2014’, Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland 46 (2016–17): 132–48.

  3. 3.

    In addition to the works cited above see Michael Lewis, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), chap. 3; Donal Donovan and Antoin Murphy, The Fall of the Celtic Tiger: Ireland and the Euro Debt Crisis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Morgan Kelly, ‘What Happened to Ireland?’, Irish Pages: A Journal of Contemporary Writing 6, no. 1 (2013): 7–19; Diarmaid Ferriter, ‘Twenty-First-Century Ireland’, in The Princeton History of Modern Ireland, ed. Richard Bourke and Ian McBride (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 170–74, 181–86.

  4. 4.

    For the classic exposition of this transition, see Joseph A. Schumpeter, ‘The Crisis of the Tax State’ (1918), in Joseph A. Schumpeter: The Economics and Sociology of Capitalism, ed. Richard Swedberg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 102–12; for a brief account of the Irish case see Peter Clarke, ‘The Historical Development of the Irish Taxation System’, Accounting, Finance and Governance Review 21, nos. 1–2 (2014): 5–24, esp. 8–10.

  5. 5.

    For theoretical discussions of taxation upon which the remainder of this paragraph draws, see Isaac William Martin, Ajay K. Mehrotra, and Monica Prasad, ‘The Thunder of History: The Origins and Development of the New Fiscal Sociology’, in The New Fiscal Sociology: Taxation in Comparative and Historical Perspective, ed. Isaac William Martin, Ajay K. Mehrotra, and Monica Prasad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 3, 14, 18–19; Stephen Smith, Taxation: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1–2, 43, 49–50, 83–89.

  6. 6.

    Smith, Taxation, 101.

  7. 7.

    See, for example, John Bristow, Taxation in Ireland: An Economist’s Perspective (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 2004).

  8. 8.

    Considerations of space preclude a full bibliography; key works include Sven Steinmo, Taxation and Democracy: Swedish, British and American Approaches to Financing the Modern State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Richard Bonney, ed., Economic Systems and State Finance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); idem, The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, c. 1200–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); W. Mark Ormrod, M. M. Bonney, and R. J. Bonney, eds., Crises, Revolutions and Self-Sustained Growth: Essays in European Fiscal History, 1130–1830 (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1999); Michael Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France: Liberté, Egalité, Fiscalité (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); José Luís Cardoso and Pedro Lains, eds., Paying for the Liberal State: The Rise of Public Finance in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla, Patrick K. O’Brien, and Francisco Comín Comín, eds., The Rise of Fiscal States: A Global History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); W. Elliot Brownlee, Federal Taxation in America: A Short History, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Kenneth Scheve and David Stasavage, Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2016); E. A. Heaman, Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867–1917 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017).

  9. 9.

    Pauric Travers, ‘The Financial Relations Question, 1800–1914’, in Ireland, England and Australia: Essays in Honour of Oliver MacDonagh, ed. F. B. Smith (Canberra: Australian National University, 1990), 43–58.

  10. 10.

    Alice Effie Murray, A History of the Commercial and Financial Relations between England and Ireland from the Period of the Restoration (London: P. S. King and Son, 1903), chaps. 9, 14–15, 17–18; Earl of Dunraven, The Finances of Ireland before the Union and after: An Historical Study (London: John Murray, 1912); George O’Brien, The Economic History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin: Maunsel, 1918), chaps. 25–26; idem, The Economic History of Ireland in the Seventeenth Century (Dublin: Maunsel, 1919), 87–94, 197–203; idem, The Economic History of Ireland from the Union to the Famine (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1921), chap. 11.

  11. 11.

    Ronan Fanning, The Irish Department of Finance, 1922–58 (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 1978), 1, 44, 51–58, 162–64, 297–306.

  12. 12.

    T. J. Kiernan, History of the Financial Administration of Ireland to 1817 (London: P. S. King and Son, 1930).

  13. 13.

    Simon Kepple, ‘A Survey of Taxation and Government Expenditure in the Irish Free State, 1922–1936’ (Master’s thesis, University College Cork, 1938); Trevor Robert McCavery, ‘Finance and Politics in Ireland, 1801–17’ (PhD diss., Queen’s University Belfast, 1981). For a rare exception, see Patricia Jalland, ‘Irish Home-Rule Finance: A Neglected Dimension of the Irish Question, 1910–1914’, Irish Historical Studies 32, no. 91 (1983): 233–53.

  14. 14.

    L. M. Cullen, ‘The Smuggling Trade in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, section c, 66 (1967–68): 149–75; K. H. Connell, ‘Illicit Distillation’, in K. H. Connell, Irish Peasant Society: Four Historical Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 1–50. Neither Cullen nor Cormac Ó Gráda, the two preeminent scholars of pre-independence Irish economic history, have paid much attention to fiscal history; see, for example, the limited coverage of taxation in Cormac Ó Gráda, Ireland: A New Economic History, 1780–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

  15. 15.

    Robert Shipkey, ‘Problems in Alcoholic Production and Controls in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland’, Historical Journal 16, no. 2 (1973): 291–302; Norma M. Dawson, ‘Illicit Distillation and the Revenue Police in Ireland in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Irish Jurist, n.s., 12, no. 2 (1977): 282–94.

  16. 16.

    David Dickson, ‘Taxation and Disaffection in Late Eighteenth-Century Ireland’, in Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest, ed. Samuel Clark and James S. Donnelly Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983): 37–63; Travers, ‘Financial Relations Question’.

  17. 17.

    L. M. Cullen, ‘Economic Development, 1691–1750’ and ‘Economic Development, 1750–1800’, in A New History of Ireland, vol. 4: Eighteenth-Century Ireland, ed. T. W. Moody and W. E. Vaughan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 123–58, 159–95; W. E. Vaughan, ‘Ireland c. 1870’, in A New History of Ireland, vol. 5: Ireland under the Union, I: 1801–70, ed. W. E. Vaughan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 786–92; H. D. Gribbon, ‘Economic and Social History’, in A New History of Ireland, vol. 6: Ireland under the Union II: 1870–1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 327–31. See also David S. Johnson and Liam Kennedy, ‘Nationalist Historiography and the Decline of the Irish Economy: George O’Brien Revisited’, in Ireland’s Histories: Aspects of State, Society and Ideology, ed. Seán Hutton and Paul Stewart (London: Routledge, 1991), 18–19; Liam Kennedy and David S. Johnson, ‘The Union of Ireland and Britain, 1801–1921’, in The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy, ed. D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (London: Routledge, 1996), 34–70.

  18. 18.

    Fanning, Irish Department of Finance; Seán Réamonn, History of the Revenue Commissioners (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 1981).

  19. 19.

    R. J. Lawrence, The Government of Northern Ireland: Public Finance and Public Services, 1921–1964 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965); Arthur J. Green, Devolution and Public Finance: Stormont from 1921 to 1972 (Glasgow: Centre for the Study of Public Policy, 1979).

  20. 20.

    Theda Skocpol, ‘Bringing the State Back in: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research’, in Bringing the State Back in, ed. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 3–37.

  21. 21.

    Patrick K. O’Brien, ‘The Political Economy of British Taxation, 1660–1815’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 41, no. 1 (1988): 1–32; John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Martin Daunton, Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); idem, Just Taxes: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1914–1979 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

  22. 22.

    Patrick Walsh, ‘Writing the History of the Financial Crisis: Lessons from the South Sea Bubble’, Working Papers in History and Policy, no. 3 (2012).

  23. 23.

    Charles Ivar McGrath, The Making of the Eighteenth-Century Irish Constitution: Government, Parliament and the Revenue, 1692–1714 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000); idem, ‘Central Aspects of the Eighteenth-Century Constitutional Framework in Ireland: The Government Supply Bill and Biennial Parliamentary Sessions, 1715–82’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland 16 (2001): 9–34; idem, Ireland and Empire, 1692–1770 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), chap. 7; Neil Johnston, ‘State Formation in Seventeenth-Century Ireland: The Restoration Financial Settlement, 1660–62’, Parliaments, Estates and Representation 36, no. 2 (2016): 115–36.

  24. 24.

    D. A. Fleming, Politics and Provincial People: Sligo and Limerick, 1691–1761 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), chap. 5; Patrick Walsh, ‘The Fiscal State in Ireland, 1691–1769’, Historical Journal 56, no. 3 (2013): 629–56; idem, ‘Enforcing the Fiscal State: The Army, the Revenue and the Irish Experience of the Fiscal-Military State, 1690–1769’, in The British Fiscal-Military States, 1660–c. 1783, ed. Aaron Graham and Patrick Walsh (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 131–58.

  25. 25.

    Timothy D. Watt, ‘Taxation Riots and the Culture of Popular Protest in Ireland, 1714–1740’, English Historical Review 130, no. 547 (2014): 1418–48.

  26. 26.

    Trevor McCavery, ‘Politics, Public Finance and the British-Irish Act of Union of 1801’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 10 (2000): 353–75; A. P. W. Malcomson, John Foster (1740–1829): The Politics of Improvement and Prosperity (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011), chaps. 5–7.

  27. 27.

    Martin McElroy, ‘The 1830 Budget and Repeal: Parliament and Public Opinion in Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies 46, no. 141 (2008): 38–52; Douglas Kanter, ‘The Politics of Irish Taxation, 1842–53’, English Historical Review 127, no. 528 (2012): 1121–55; idem, ‘The Galway Packet-Boat Contract and the Politics of Public Expenditure in Mid-Victorian Ireland’, Historical Journal 59, no. 3 (2016): 747–74; Charles Read, ‘The “Repeal Year” in Ireland: An Economic Reassessment’, Historical Journal 58, no. 1 (2015): 111–35.

  28. 28.

    Sinéad Sturgeon, ‘Maria Edgeworth, William Carleton and the Battle for the Spirit of Ireland’, Irish Studies Review 14, no. 4 (2006): 431–45; Jim Herlihy, The Irish Revenue Police: A Short History and Genealogical Guide to the ‘Poteen Hussars’ (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2018).

  29. 29.

    K. Theodore Hoppen, Governing Hibernia: British Politicians and Ireland, 1800–1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

  30. 30.

    Kieran Coleman and John Considine, ‘The No Income Tax Campaign: Twenty-First-Century Tax Philosophy in 1920s Ireland’, Irish Economic and Social History 33 (2006): 1–17; Ryan McCourt, ‘Ernest Blythe as Minister for Finance in the Irish Free State, 1923–32’, Parliamentary History 33, no. 3 (2014): 475–500; Dominic de Cogan, ‘The Wartime Origins of the Irish Corporation Tax’, Irish Journal of Legal Studies 3, no. 2 (2013): 15–32.

  31. 31.

    Niamh Hardiman, ‘Taxing the Poor: The Politics of Income Taxation in Ireland’, Policy Studies Journal 28, no. 4 (2000): 815–42; idem, ‘The Development of the Irish Tax State’, Irish Political Studies 17, no. 1 (2002): 29–58; idem, ‘Paying for Government’, in Dissecting Irish Politics: Essays in Honour of Brian Farrell (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2004), 82–100; Hardiman and Regan, ‘Politics of Austerity’; James Mitchell, ‘Undignified and Inefficient: Financial Relations between London and Stormont’, Contemporary British History 20, no. 1 (2006): 55–71.

  32. 32.

    Clarke, ‘Historical Development’.

  33. 33.

    McGrath, Irish Constitution, 24–32.

  34. 34.

    D’Maris Coffman, Excise Taxation and the Origins of Public Debt (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

  35. 35.

    See James Guilfoyle’s chapter.

  36. 36.

    Charles Ivar McGrath, ‘The Irish Experience of “Financial Revolution”’, in Money, Power, and Print: Interdisciplinary Studies on the Financial Revolution in the British Isles, ed. Charles Ivar McGrath and Chris Fauske (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 157–88; Walsh, ‘Irish Fiscal State’, passim.

  37. 37.

    Watt, ‘Taxation Riots’; Connell, ‘Illicit Distillation’.

  38. 38.

    See also James Kelly, Food Rioting in Ireland in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: The ‘Moral Economy’ and the Irish Crowd (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2017), 62–92.

  39. 39.

    On turnpikes see David Broderick, The First Toll-Roads: Ireland’s Turnpike Roads, 1729–1858 (Cork: Collins Press, 2002); on tithes see Maurice Bric, ‘The Tithe System in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, section c, 86 (1987): 271–88.

  40. 40.

    On the Tithe War see David P. Reid, ‘The Tithe War in Ireland, 1830–1838’ (PhD diss., Trinity College Dublin, 2013).

  41. 41.

    Eoin Magennis, ‘A “Presbyterian Insurrection”? Reconsidering the Hearts of Oak Disturbances of July 1763’, Irish Historical Studies 31, no. 122 (1998): 165–87.

  42. 42.

    Vincent Morley, The Popular Mind in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2017), 62–63; House of Commons, ‘Report of the Select Committee Appointed to Consider of the Best Mode of Apportioning More Equally the Local Burthens Collected in Ireland’, Sessional Papers 1824 (445), vol. 8, p. 79, quoted in Jacinta Prunty Maps and Map-Making in Local History (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), 22.

  43. 43.

    Virginia Crossman, ‘The Growth of the State in Nineteenth-Century Ireland’, in The Cambridge History of Ireland, vol. 3, ed. James Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 555.

  44. 44.

    Ibid.

  45. 45.

    See the chapter by Michelle D’Arcy and Marina Nistotskaya.

  46. 46.

    Dickson, ‘Taxation and Disaffection’.

  47. 47.

    E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present 50 (1971): 115–18; Kelly, Food Rioting, 136–42.

  48. 48.

    Sarah H. Meacham, Every Home a Distillery: Alcohol, Gender, and Technology in the Colonial Chesapeake (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

  49. 49.

    Padhraig Higgins, ‘Consumption, Gender, and the Politics of “Free Trade” in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 41, no. 1 (2007): 87–105.

  50. 50.

    L. M. Cullen, An Economic History of Ireland since 1660, 2nd ed. (London: Batsford Press, 1987), 168.

  51. 51.

    Peter Leary, Unapproved Routes: Histories of the Irish Border, 1922–1972 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), chap. 4.

  52. 52.

    For an earlier analysis, see Cullen, Economic History of Ireland, 55, 58–59, 131.

  53. 53.

    Green, Devolution and Public Finance.

  54. 54.

    Kevin Hjortshøj O’Rourke, ‘Independent Ireland in Comparative Perspective’, Irish Economic and Social History 44 (2017): 19–45.

  55. 55.

    Ibid., 36–37; idem, ‘Ireland and the Bigger Picture’, in Refiguring Ireland: Essays in Honour of L. M. Cullen, ed. David Dickson and Cormac Ó Gráda (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2003), 354–55.

  56. 56.

    ‘PIGS’ was the shorthand employed by commentators during the Eurozone crisis to refer to Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain.

  57. 57.

    Mary E. Daly, ‘An Irish-Ireland for Business?: The Control of Manufactures Acts, 1932 and 1934’, Irish Historical Studies 24, no. 94 (1984): 246–72; idem, Industrial Development and Irish National Identity, 1922–1939 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1992); Frank Barry and Clare O’Mahony, Costello, Lemass and the Politics of the New Foreign Investment Regime of the 1950s (Trinity College Dublin: Mimeo, 2016).

  58. 58.

    Donovan and Murphy, Fall of the Celtic Tiger, 17.

  59. 59.

    For some consideration of these ideas see Seán Ó Riain, The Rise and Fall of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger: Liberalism, Boom and Bust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

  60. 60.

    Seán Ó Riain, ‘The Road to Austerity’, and Stephen Kinsella, ‘Economic and Fiscal Policy’, in Austerity and Recovery, ed. Roche, O’Connell, and Prothero, 23–39, 40–61.

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  1. Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA

    Douglas Kanter

  2. Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Patrick Walsh

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    Douglas Kanter

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    Patrick Walsh

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Kanter, D., Walsh, P. (2019). Introduction. In: Kanter, D., Walsh, P. (eds) Taxation, Politics, and Protest in Ireland, 1662–2016. Palgrave Studies in the History of Finance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04309-4_1

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