Religion and Child Death in Ireland’s Industrial Capital: Belfast 1911

Ireland is often seen as an outlier within the western world in terms of demographic behavior. As a society it has also been noted for its religious fervor, including religious division, at least until fairly recently. Might there be connections historically between these two spheres? One intriguing area of enquiry relates to possible links between religious denomination and child mortality. We explore this possibility using individual-level data from the household schedules of the Irish Census of 1911. The study area is Belfast, Ireland’s leading industrial city, which allows for a wide range of occupational and social class differences. Combining regression techniques and the mortality index proposed by Preston and Haines (1991), we seek to tease out the relationship between child mortality and religious affiliation while controlling for a range of other explanatory variables. We show that religious identity is clearly associated with different infant and child mortality outcomes. Of the three major religious denominations, Catholics suffered the most from high infant mortality, Church of Ireland (Anglican) families were only a little better off, while the largest Protestant denomination, the Presbyterians, had the best infant mortality outcomes. These differences were related, in the main, to the varying socioeconomic composition of the three major religious denominations but religious affiliation also mattered in its own right.