The Irish Shopkeeper and the Law of Bankruptcy 1860-1930

Consumerism and shop going—products of urbanisation and of the expansion of the cash economy—surged in post-famine Ireland. This development enabled changes in consumption patterns. A greater number of Irish people had access to the pleasures of tea, sugar, mass-produced beer and fashionable factory-produced clothes. Villages and towns were brightened by a doubling in the number of shops. An incident of the rise of shops was, of course, a rise in the number of shopkeepers. By the mid-nineteenth century the number of persons whose occupation was described as shopkeeper had increased from 61 per 10,000 to 132 per 10,000 in the population; between 1881 and 1901 there was a 25 per cent increase in the number of shopkeepers trading in Ireland