‘Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine’1 – shadow and shade in Irish accounting history

Abstract

Over the last decade, Accounting, Business & Financial History has featured country-based special issues with the expressed aim of ‘internationalising’ the study of accounting history. Countries and accounting locales which have been the subject of these special issues include France (1997, 2001), the United States (2000), Japan (2001), Spain (2002), China (2003), the ‘German language arena’ (2005) and Italy (2007). Ireland is the smallest of these locales in terms of population if not the length of its written history. Accounting history research in Ireland and on Ireland has been correspondingly limited and in the main, though not exclusively, published in Ireland. Notable forays into the field of Irish accounting history include Clarke’s work on early accounting texts (Clarke 1996a, 1996b) and on the later nature of accounting change in Ireland (Clarke 2001, 2004, 2006; Clarke and Gardner 2004). Studies of individual contributions to accounting in Ireland and elsewhere are found in Clarke’s work on Bernard F. Shields, ‘First Professor of Accountancy in the UK’ (Clarke 2005), Meagher’s study of Elias Voster (Meagher 1994) and Ó hÓgartaigh and Ó hÓgartaigh’s ‘reflections on the involvement of four Irishmen in the commercial life of the New South Wales colony, 1788–1818’(Ó hÓgartaigh and Ó hÓgartaigh 2004). At a broader societal level, O’Regan’s (2003, 106) examination ‘of the ways in which accounting information can be used to affect the regulative and distributive ambitions of powerful élites’ contrasts with Ó hÓgartaigh and Ó hÓgartaigh’s (2006, 2007) suggestion that early manifestations of accounting education a century prior to professionalisation characterised it, in that instance, ‘as an instrument of the underclass, a means of entry to the world of the middle-man, the agent and the clerk, a tool of progression rather than of power’ (Ó hÓgartaigh and Ó hÓgartaigh 2006, 71). The political context of the establishment of the accounting profession is explored by Annisette and O’Regan (2007). Jeacle utilises archival material from two Irish department stores, along with department stores elsewhere, and skilfully situates it in the wider, international context of ‘the construction of the consumer’ (Jeacle 1999) and ‘the shifting technologies of credit’ (Jeacle and Walsh 2002). Ó hÓgartaigh and Ó hÓgartaigh (2004a, 2004b) provide a catalogue of accounting and business archives in the National Archives of Ireland and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland2 arguing (2004a, 20) that they ‘are a significant resource for the further development and internationalisation of Irish accounting history and . . . for an enhanced interface between history and accounting’. The nature and extent of previous research in Irish accounting history reflects in part the size and longevity of the community of Irish accounting academics and accounting historians. It