Innovation Ph.D. bursary awarded

March 11th 2010

Professor Poul Holm (Academic Director of the Long Room Hub) and Dr. Mark Hennessy (Geography) have been awarded one of the ten Innovation Ph.D. bursaries. These are intended to fund interdisciplinary research. The project will also engage with the work of the Innovation Academy.

Project Title:

Irish fisheries of the medieval and early modern period: scale and causes of decline.

This study will be based on two lines of inquiry and inform at least two disciplinary interests, history and geography. A study of the decline of the Irish fishing industry may provide a striking historical illustration of economic path-dependency. Likewise it will inform geographical understanding of population settlement around the Irish coast. It will provide a backdrop to our understanding of marine resources today. The disaster of the hunger years from 1846 showed that the Irish economy was unsustainably based on agricultural produce, mainly the potato. At the same time observers were fully aware of the potential of the sea to provide an additional food source and the fishing industry had been well-developed in the medieval and early-modern period. What locked Ireland into a disastrous economic neglect of the sea? Was this unique to Ireland or was the under-development of the sea fisheries part of a wider European pattern?