Residential Exodus From Dublin Circa 1900 : Municipal Annexation and Preferences for Local Government

This paper draws from the view of social historians and hypothesizes that both wealthy and Protestant residents of Dublin were fleeing the city due to distaste for its local government politics and taxation, in an era when local government was gaining importance. We use a limited municipal-boundary expansion that occurred in Dublin in 1901 as mechanism to test this conjecture. We offer evidence that wealthy and/or Protestant residents were more inclined to leave the incorporated townships than the independent townships, arguably, as a sign of their disenchantment with municipal government politics and high taxation