The series of austerity budgets passed in Ireland since the onset of the banking and sovereign debt crisis in 2008 have underscored the centrality of taxation to modern Irish politics. Disputes over who should pay, how taxes should be levied, and the mechanisms by which they should be collected have featured prominently in public debate and have influenced popular attitudes towards government and the state.1 Taxes that have been imposed or collected in what the public has perceived to be an ‘unfair’ manner—such as the household charge and the water charge—have provoked protest, evasion, and resistance.2 Most historically informed commentary on the financial crisis has focused on the short and medium terms.3 But fiscal policy has played a significant role in Irish politics since the middle of 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.4 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.5 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. Indeed, the history of Irish taxation connects popular to ‘high’ politics and Irish peripheries to the centres of power, often exposing fault lines between civil society and the government, and raising enduring questions about equity, consent, and legitimacy.
The present anthology explores these issues over the longue durée, in order to identify elements of both continuity and change in the Irish experience of taxation over some 350 years. It takes for its point of departure the Irish Parliament’s approval of the ‘new’ hereditary revenues in 1662, which unwittingly initiated the transformation of the Irish tax system, and it closes with the Dáil’s decision to suspend the water charge in 2016 when confronted by widespread public opposition. This volume does not seek to advance a particular ideological perspective or methodological approach but reflects the conviction, expressed by one recent commentator, that ‘taxation is first and foremost a political issue’.6 Accordingly, the chapters featured here foreground policymaking, public debate, and popular protest rather than the sort of economic analysis that conventionally figures in the social scientific study of public finance.7
Historiography
The emergence of the tax state was not, of course, a uniquely Irish phenomenon. Nor was the equivocal public reaction to the rise of a more intrusive and extractive government bureaucracy distinctively Irish. Rather, Irish developments mirrored broader European, and ultimately global, trends, which are frequently associated with the advent of modernity. Yet while scholars focusing on other nation-states in Europe and the ‘West’ have produced a robust interdisciplinary literature on the history of taxation, the subject has remained marginal to Irish studies.8 The work on Irish fiscal history that has previously appeared is scattered in piecemeal form across a range of unpublished theses, book chapters, journal articles, and monographs, many of which are either outdated or difficult to source.
The earliest scholarly histories of Irish taxation were written in the first decades of the twentieth century and were moulded by the political circumstances of the era. The home rule debates of 1886 and 1893 had called attention to the complex and contested nature of Anglo-Irish financial relations, and by 1896 a royal commission had collated and corrected much of the data necessary for academic appraisal.9 With expectations for home rule rising as Unionist government faltered after 1900, diachronic inquiry into Irish finance seemed to have immediate policy implications. Between 1903 and 1921, consequently, British Liberals, Irish nationalists, and constructive unionists all composed histories of Irish public finance. Notwithstanding the disparate political views of the authors and relatively minor differences in their findings, these studies generally emphasised the exploitative character of Irish taxation as imposed by British politicians and their Anglo-Irish proxies.10 Academic interest began to wane, however, following the establishment of Northern Ireland (1920) and the Irish Free State (1922). The latter’s conformity to British fiscal norms complicated nationalist criticism of past practice, while the gradual resolution of outstanding Anglo-Irish financial disputes in the 1920s and 1930s finally closed enduring controversies.11 Though the last major nationalist analysis was published so late as 1930, Irish tax history, deprived of a political raison d’être, seemed to have lost its relevance.12
Little historical scholarship appeared over the next seventy years. The study of Irish fiscal policy reached a low ebb, with some of the most significant work left unpublished.13 For the pre-independence period, economic historians shifted their focus from public finance to private enterprise, with important mid-century studies by L. M. Cullen and K. H. Connell examining tax evasion in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.14 Connell’s investigation of illicit distillation, in turn, provided a slight stimulus to work on revenue enforcement.15 Subsequently, David Dickson and Pauric Travers began to recover a previously obscure history of tax resistance and protest in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.16 But nationalist allegations of over-taxation, which the first generation of Irish fiscal historians had found persuasive, were given short shrift. The New History of Ireland, articulating the historical consensus towards the close of the century, was dismissive of nationalist grievances without devoting close attention to the structure of Irish taxation or the details of the Irish tax code.17 For the post-independence period, meanwhile, the discussion of southern taxation was mainly confined to institutional histories.18 Northern public finance received somewhat greater consideration, owing to the unusual arrangements needed to sustain the Stormont regime.19
In the twenty-first century, interest in the history of Irish taxation has experienced a modest revival. This development is related, firstly, to the rise of the ‘new institutionalism’ in political science and sociology, which has provided a conceptual framework for the analysis of the state.20 It is linked, secondly, to advances in the field of British fiscal history associated with the pioneering studies of P. K. O’Brien, John Brewer, and Martin Daunton.21 In work that ranged from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, Brewer and Daunton, in particular, argued that taxation was constitutive of the British state, traced the political and constitutional ramifications of fiscal policy, and recognised the significant role played by the revenue bureaucracy in connecting central government to society. Because much of the Irish fiscal system was adopted and adapted from Britain, the appearance of their work was perhaps a precondition for the emergence of a more sophisticated approach to the history of Irish taxation. Finally, the Irish manifestation of the global financial crisis that commenced in 2008 has redirected scholarly focus and encouraged a reconsideration of public finance.22
The upshot has been renewed attention to Ireland’s fiscal history from the mid-seventeenth to the late twentieth centuries. For the early modern period, Ivar McGrath and Neil Johnston have examined the political process by which taxation was approved, along with its implications for Irish governance.23 David Fleming and Patrick Walsh have linked rising demands for revenue to the evolution of an Irish fiscal-military state and have outlined public responses to this phenomenon.24 Timothy Watt has underscored the extent to which the growth of the Irish ‘Leviathan’ provoked protest and resistance.25 For the nineteenth century, Trevor McCavery and A. P. W. Malcomson have explored the fiscal challenges faced by Irish and British politicians following the passage of the Act of Union (1800), as constraints on taxation imposed by the new constitutional settlement came into conflict with escalating expenditure.26 Martin Mc...