Trinity Week Academic Symposium: Origins, Mission and Significance‪.‬

This symposium celebrates the launch of a dedicated website of the proceedings of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, and its direct ancestor the Dublin Statistical Society. The Dublin Statistical Society was founded on 23 November 1847 with the mission to bring professional expertise to bear on pressing contemporary social and economic issues. The timing is not coincidental: 1847 was probably the worst year in the history of modern Ireland. This was the beginning of the third year of the great famine; death and emigration were at record levels, as was the incidence of disease. The British government was suffering from 'compassion fatigue'; they had ended all special measures for famine relief and abandoned Ireland to its own resources, placing the entire burden of relief on the inadequate and inexperienced Irish Poor Law, which was breaking down under the strain. Landlords, faced with record rates bills and unpaid rents were evicting tenants and clearing their estates, and the emigrant ships contained not just the destitute and desperate, but many substantial farmers with their families. An international financial crisis only added to the gloom. Irish politics was also in disarray, following the death of Daniel O'Connell and the collapse of the Irish Convention which had attempted to achieve some political consensus on critical issues such as land reform. (1) The Dublin Statistical Society can be seen as an attempt by some of the city's elite to agree on possible solutions to Ireland's crisis, offering what they believed to be a scientific and objective alternative to partisan, and discredited political solutions. The Society aimed at 'promoting the study of Statistics and Economical Science', and like the Royal Irish Academy, it determined to reject all papers that would provoke discussions relating to party politics or religion. Its mission is summed up in its motto: 'Our pole star is truth'; the fact that this was written in English, and not in Latin--a language familiar to most of the founding members--highlights the message that the society was addressing contemporary issues, using contemporary intellectual tools.