End of the World BookToday Ireland s population is rising, immigration outpaces emigration, most families have two or at most three children, and full time farmers are in steady decline. But the opposite was true for more than a century, from the great famine of the 1840s until the 1960s. Between 1922 and 1966 most of the first fifty years after independence the population of Ireland was falling, in the 1950s as rapidly as in the 1880s. Mary Daly s The Slow Failure