Ciarán Ó hÓgartaigh

‘Irish property should pay for Irish poverty’: accounting for the poor in pre-famine Ireland

According to Walker [2004. Expense, social and moral control. Accounting and the administration of the old poor law in England and Wales. Journal of Accounting and Public Policy 23, no. 2: 85–127; 2008. Accounting, paper shadows and the stigmatised poor. Accounting, Organizations and Society 33, no. 4/5: 453–87] accounting contributed to the stigmatisation of the pauper and served to construct the social worlds of the old and new poor laws in England and Wales. Walkers encouragement of further research motivated the current examination of accounting for the poor in Ireland. The focus is on the early, pre-famine years of the Irish Poor Law, 1838–1845 – a law whose context and content differed in several critical respects from that which prevailed in England and Wales. The study draws on data contained in the minute books of regular meetings of the Castlebar Unions Board of Governors, as well as from the Poor Law Commissions annual summary reports. Analysis of these materials suggests a context in which accounting neither constructed a social world nor stigmatised recipients of poor relief. It is argued that accounting is better viewed as contingent, reflecting the dynamics of a complex, divisive, and highly controversial undertaking – governmental redistribution of wealth – during a laissez-faire era when utilitarian and individualistic principles dominated discussions of political economy. From a broad perspective, accounting can be viewed as providing rationality and transparency to a social experiment that was encumbered with moral ambiguity and embedded conflicts of interest. More specifically, accounting texts contain the documentation required by an absentee administrative cadre to monitor expenditures, justify rates on Irish property, and ensure that procedures in the statute were carried out as specified.

Clowns of no account? Reflections on the involvement of four Irishmen in the commercial life of the Colony of New South Wales, 1788-1818

This paper reflects on the involvement of four Irishmen in the commercial affairs of the fledgling British colony in Sydney, New South Wales (NSW), between 1788 and 1818. They are John Kenny, a felon transported from Carlow (allegedly the first teacher of double-entry accounting in Australia); Michael Hayes, a Wexford rebel (the first to advertise in the Sydney Gazette for work as an accountant); Sergeant Jeremiah Murphy, a native of Creagh serving in the British Army (the first customer to open a bank account in Australia); and John Thomas Campbell, an Ulster loyalist (the first President of the Bank of NSW). We find representations of the Irish that are partly in accord with, and yet partly very much removed from, conventional stereotypes of the Irish. While accounting was a currency worth counterfeiting in early NSW, it did not unlock new opportunities given the constraints of the colonial context.

Participation and Non-Participation in the Standard Setting Process

The Accounting Standards Board (‘the ASB’) was established in the UK in 1990. Among its objectives is the improvement of standards of financial accounting and reporting for the benefit of users, preparers and auditors of financial information (ASB, 1991). The Board sets out inter alia to “determine what should be incorporated in accounting standards based on research, public consultation and careful deliberation about the usefulness of the resulting information” (ASB, 1991, p.2) and through “feedback from both the regulated and the consumer” (Financial Reporting Council, 1997, p.56). It aims to meet this objective by issuing accounting standards after “extensive consultation” (Financial Reporting Council, 1992, p.7). This chapter examines the characteristics of those who formally involve themselves in the standard setting process of the ASB by making submissions regarding its proposals for accounting standards. In doing so, the chapter contributes to a view of the public consultation that shapes accounting standards.

How it essentially was: Truth claims in history and accounting

This paper compares and contrasts the conceptualization of “profession” in history and accounting. Professional history and, to a more limited extent, professional accounting have their 19th century origins in notions of scientific method and objectivity as well as in motives of “closure” and exclusivity. The paper argues that these “scientific” origins of both history and accounting rendered them exclusive not only in membership but in methodology. As scientific approaches relied on documentary evidence, various rich, if less reliable, sources of evidence were excluded. This resulted in the representation of a limited and flawed “reality” in both history and accounting which led to 20th century threats to their legitimacy. The paper concludes that exploration of the interfaces between history and accounting offers new perspectives on both disciplines as we enter the 21st century.

A Signaling Theory of Accounting Conservatism

In this paper, we offer a new theory for the economic demand of accounting conservatism, which emphasizes the signaling role of conservatism in a debt market with asymmetric information. In our model, accounting conservatism serves as a signal by which the borrower firm can convey their private information about its own operating risk to the lenders, prior to signing the debt contract. In developing this signaling theory of conservatism, our paper achieves two major outcomes: (1) we analytically derive four basic properties of accounting conservatism, based on Basus (1997) asymmetric timeliness of earnings definition of conservatism; (2) we develop a signaling model of the debt market, where accounting conservatism serves as a signaling device. Our conservatism-signaling model has a dominant separating equilibrium, in which the low risk firms choose a high level of conservatism and the high risk firms choose a low (zero) level of conservatism. We show that this is the only stable equilibrium in our model that can pass Cho and Krepss Intuitive Criterion (1987). Our results indicate that conservatism benefits the debt market by reducing the information asymmetry in the debt market.

'Ar scath a cheile a mhaireann na daoine' - shadow and shade in Irish accounting history

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

Corporate Governance Archives in the National Archives of Ireland and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland

This note reports on a research project which resulted in the compilation of a database of corporate governance archives in the National Archives of Ireland (NAI) and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRON!). The database, which comprises 332 archival sources at the NAI and 68 at the PRONI, is categorised and manipulable by catalogue number, the name of the company or organisation to which the records relate, the geographical area and sector in which the company or organisation was or is based and date of type of records. Accounting history represents a relatively under-explored area of research. One measure of the limited extent of such research is that only three accounting history articles! have been published in The Irish Accounting Review the Journal of the Irish Accounting and Finance Association in the thirteen years since its inceptionf representing less than 2 per cent of the total articles published in that journal. The database described in this note the first of its kind in the accounting area in Ireland offers a significant resource for the further development and internationalisation of Irish accounting history in Ireland and, the note argues, for an enhanced and mutually beneficial interface between history and accounting. The article is in four main sections. The next section highlights the importance of evidence and the archive in historical research and briefly