Introduction
Accounting history has continuously evolved as a field of academic research, offering insights into not only the past but also the present state of accounting, business, and governance. Specialised journals have for many years provided valuable platforms for research that explores accounting in its historical dimensions. However, some contexts have received comparatively limited attention, including the Irish context. Despite a distinctive and complex economic, political, and cultural heritage, the accounting history of Ireland, and particularly of Northern Ireland, remains relatively underexplored (Ó hÓgartaigh, 2008). The Editors of the Accounting, Finance & Governance Review (AFGR) invited proposals for a special issue dedicated to accounting history, and with a particular, though not exclusive, welcome for submissions drawing on the Irish context.
The call for papers invited scholarly work drawing on archival or other historical data across a wide range of topics, including the development of the accountancy profession, the history of accounting education, accounting within Irish businesses or those connected to Ireland, accounting in charities and local and central government, and comparative international accounting history (Carnegie & Napier, 2002). Contributors were encouraged to look broadly at financial accounting and reporting, management accounting, finance and governance and accountability. The response to this call has produced papers that are diverse in their themes and methods yet united by interpreting neglected dimensions of accounting history.
This special issue presents four papers, which together span a wide chronology, from the weighing of souls in ancient Egypt to the bus services of a 20th-century railway company, and they engage with a variety of organisations, sectors, and theoretical frameworks. One paper, by Renzo Cordina, Rosa Michaelson and David Power, takes a wide macro-historical view of eschatological traditions (linking to the Irish context), and the idea of being called to account at death, exploring how ancient religious metaphors of balance, record-keeping, and judgement may have helped shape the moral foundations of modern accounting. The other three papers included in this special issue are grounded in archival investigation of Irish organisations. Julie Bertz and Martin Quinn examine the financial accounts of the Belfast Water Commissioners between 1840 and 1890. Brendan Clerkin offers an exploratory accounting history of the Londonderry & Lough Swilly Railway Company from 1884 to 1947, a Victorian-era firm that survived long after its contemporaries by pivoting from rail to road transport. These two papers draw on the lens of institutional theory to explain their findings. Finally, Desmond Gibney adds to extant research on Irish brewers by tracing the accounting practices of Macardle Moore and Company, a family-owned brewery in Dundalk, from the late 19th century into the early 20th century.
These four papers make several significant contributions. They extend the geographic scope of accounting history research across the island of Ireland; they recover the stories of organisations, quasi-public utilities, family businesses and transport companies that have been neglected in the accounting history literature; they also demonstrate the value of theoretical lenses such as institutional theory and macro-history for interpreting accounting change and stability over long time. Finally, they remind us that accounting is not merely a technical practice (Hopwood, 1983): it is embedded in legal structures, civic norms, religious traditions, and cultural assumptions that shape how organisations and individuals understand their responsibilities and render their accounts.
We have summarised each paper below. As Guest Editors, we express our gratitude to all who submitted work for this special issue, to the reviewers who gave generously of their time and expertise, and to the Editors and Editorial Team of AFGR for their support throughout the process. We hope that this special issue will stimulate further research into Irish and comparative international accounting history, and that it will serve as inspiration for scholars who want to understand accounting’s past to illuminate its present.
The Papers: A Summary
Weighed in the Balance – Accounting and Ideas of Judgement at the Time of Death: From the Egyptian to the Early Irish Christian Traditions
The first paper in this special issue, by Cordina, Michaelson and Power, is the most ambitious in its chronological scope, deploying a macro-historical approach to trace the persistence of eschatological themes (beliefs about death, judgement, and the afterlife) across several millennia and multiple religious traditions. The authors argue that the notion of being called to account for one’s deeds at the moment of death is not merely a curiosity of ancient religion; it can be understood as a cultural precursor to, and a moral framework for, the accounting practices that eventually became formalised in commerce and governance.
The paper is organised around three recurring eschatological tropes: the weighing of deeds, the keeping of a book of life/book of deeds in which good and bad acts are recorded, and the role of mediators or intercessors who stand between the individual and ultimate judgement. These three motifs are identified across Egyptian, Zoroastrian, Jewish, and early Christian traditions, and the paper traces both continuities and transformations as these ideas migrate across cultures and centuries. In the Egyptian tradition, the Book of the Dead, in use from approximately 1700 BCE until around 100 CE, depicted the weighing of the deceased’s heart against the feather of Maat as the central ritual of judgement. Scribes, who were often priests, occupied a dual role as accountants of both the living state and the funerary process. The Zoroastrian tradition introduced the notion of a written account book of deeds maintained throughout life and submitted at death to divine assessors, while Manichaeism, strongly influenced by Zoroastrianism, extended and transmitted these ideas into early Christianity.
The paper pays particular attention to Irish evidence. The early Irish church was a significant conduit for the transmission and creative adaptation of eschatological imagery from the Mediterranean world. Several Irish high crosses of the 9th and 10th centuries, produced in the aftermath of the Céile Dé reform movement, depict scenes of the Last Judgement and the weighing of souls by the Archangel Michael, often in contest with a small devil pulling at the scales. The Cross of Muiredach provides a canonical example. The paper argues that the visual power of such imagery, displayed in monastic centres that were hubs of learning and spiritual formation, helped to naturalise the idea that one’s life must be rendered as an account, balanced and judged. Irish poetry from the 13th century onwards invokes Michael as intercessor, asking him to counter-weigh the debts of the soul. Irish monasteries, meanwhile, maintained proto-accounting records that reflected both the management of earthly resources and the avoidance of sin associated with property ownership, demonstrating the practical intertwining of spiritual and material accountability.
The theoretical contribution of the paper lies in its use of macro-history, a methodological and theoretical lens, which seeks to identify deep structural continuities and long-term transformations across civilisations (Braudel, 1995; Christian, 2005). Within accounting history, macro-historical approaches remain rare, and the authors explicitly respond to calls by Carmona and Ezzamel (2020) for research that takes a broader view of the relationships between religion and accounting. The paper argues that images of judgement at death mattered for accounting history because they naturalised the act of rendering an account. By presenting moral worth in terms of weighing, balancing, and recording, these eschatological traditions helped make accounting a familiar and persuasive way of organising life long before it became a formal technical discipline. The paper draws a connection between this visual and symbolic tradition and the argument about the religious and moral roots of double-entry bookkeeping (Aho, 2005), as well as the analysis of the role of visualisation in stabilising accounting ideas (Quattrone, 2009).
This is a thought-provoking contribution. It positions accounting history not as a technical record but as a dimension of the long human story of moral self-examination. In so doing, it also situates the Irish contribution to that story, through the high crosses, the poetry, and the monastic culture of early medieval Ireland, as significant and substantive rather than peripheral.
Accounting for Water: The Belfast Water Commissioners, 1840 to 1890
This paper by Bertz and Quinn turns to the more immediate world of Victorian public administration. It examines the accounts of the Belfast Water Commissioners (BWC) between 1840 and 1890, with two objectives: to document the content of these accounts and trace changes over time, and to explain observed patterns of change and stability through the lens of institutional theory. This work advances the literature on Irish accounting history, offering one of the few historical analyses of accounting for water utilities in the context of 19th-century public service provision.
Belfast’s water supply in the early 19th century was fragmented and inadequate. A series of failed efforts by private citizens and charitable bodies, notably the Belfast Charitable Society, to provide reliable piped water to the growing industrial city culminated in the Belfast Water Act of 1840, which established the BWC as a statutory quasi-public body. The BWC were not part of Belfast Corporation but operated independently, empowered to levy water rates, borrow money, construct and maintain waterworks and appoint officers with clearly segregated financial responsibilities. The 1840 Act embedded fundamental principles of financial control from the outset: all monies received and disbursed were to be recorded, no single individual could hold the positions of both clerk and treasurer, accounts were to be submitted to ratepayer-elected auditors every three years, and abstracts of accounts were to be published in local newspapers ahead of public meetings. The paper draws on archival records held at the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), including hand-written triennial accounts from 1840 and printed annual accounts from 1866. Using these records, the paper traces how the financial accounts evolved over five decades.
The paper adopts Scott’s (2014) three pillars of institutions (regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive) to interpret its findings, complemented by the concept of organisational routines (Burns & Scapens, 2000; Quinn & Jackson, 2014). The regulative pillar is shown to be the dominant force in the BWC case. Each successive Belfast Water Act (in 1840, 1865, 1874, 1879, 1884, and 1889) reinforced and incrementally extended the accounting requirements established by its predecessor. The shift from triennial to annual reporting and auditing under the 1865 Act was one of the most significant changes, but it represented more of the same in terms of underlying practice as the accounts continued on a receipts-and-payments basis throughout the period; there was no move to the accruals innovations noted in contemporary English municipal corporations. The 1889 Act brought two novel elements: the power to issue municipal stock, which appeared in the 1890 accounts, and the requirement to send abstracts to the Local Government Board in Dublin – the first central government oversight in the BWC’s history.
The normative pillar is evident in the civic culture surrounding the BWC’s accountability. The public expectation that the Commissioners would present their accounts clearly at open meetings, and the media attention these meetings attracted, reinforced compliance not merely through fear of legal penalty but through a sense of duty and legitimacy in the eyes of the community. The gradual shift from handwritten to typed accounts, and the growing level of detail in the statements over the decades, reflected unwritten expectations that public administration should become more professional and legible even as the law did not explicitly demand this. The cultural-cognitive pillar, perhaps the subtlest to observe in archival records, is manifested in the remarkable stability of the basic format and categories of the accounts across 50 years. The receipts-and-disbursements structure established in the 1840s persisted with only minor modifications. The roles of treasurer, clerk, and auditor were reproduced through successive generations, and the annual cycle of accounts preparation, audit, and public meetings became so thoroughly embedded that all such tasks were probably enacted as a matter of routine rather than conscious choice.
This paper makes a significant addition to the literature on Irish accounting history and local government accounting history, and it provides one of the few instances of archive-based accounting research focused on an organisation in Northern Ireland. Its findings enrich the comparative literature on British municipal accounting (Coombs & Edwards, 1995) and demonstrate the value of combining archival analysis with a theoretically informed institutional perspective for interpreting long-run patterns of accounting change and stability.
An Accounting History of Railway Companies in Ireland: An Exploratory Study of the Londonderry & Lough Swilly Railway Company, 1884 to 1947
This paper by Clerkin presents the first accounting history study of railway companies in an Irish context. It examines the annual reports and financial accounts of the Londonderry & Lough Swilly Railway Company (L&LSRC) from 1884, and the earliest available accounts, to 1947, when the company’s railway lines closed. The L&LSRC was incorporated by Act of Parliament in 1853 and operated primarily in Counties Derry and Donegal, in what would become after the partition of Ireland in 1921, a cross-border region straddling Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State. The company survived as an independent going concern until 2014 focused on the road transport business. When it went into liquidation it was by then the oldest Victorian-era railway company still trading as a commercial concern. This involves an extraordinary longevity that the paper attributes to a combination of commendable corporate governance, good management, and a willingness to embrace radical strategic change.
The paper draws on the accounts and annual reports of the L&LSRC, which were accessed through the archives Córas Iompair Éireann. The records are split into four distinct periods for the purposes of analysis: 1884 to 1900 (earliest records to the Companies Act 1900); 1901 to 1920 (the Companies Act 1900 to the partition of Ireland); 1921 to 1939 (partition to World War II); and 1940 to 1947 (the war years to the closure of the railway lines). The paper finds that the L&LSRC was already exhibiting commendable governance practices from its earliest available accounts in 1884, which was before compulsory audit was introduced by the Companies Act 1900 and, notably, even before the founding of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland in 1888. Accounts were prepared half-yearly, presented to shareholders within two months of the period end, signed by the chairman and company secretary, audited externally, and the auditors rotated by convention. The revenue account and balance sheet were detailed, contained prior-year comparisons, and disclosed items such as capital raised by loans and debenture stock in a manner recognisable in modern financial reporting.
The Railway Companies (Accounts and Returns) Act 1911 marked a significant regulative shift, requiring standardised annual accounts and detailed statistical returns to be submitted to the Board of Trade. The resulting accounts became substantially longer and more sophisticated, including management accounting disclosures such as average fares per passenger and detailed breakdowns of goods and passenger traffic by category. The paper notes that even during the turbulent period of government control during World War I, and the subsequent Irish War of Independence, the L&LSRC accounts remained remarkably detailed, though the precise causes of the wartime disruption were discreetly left unspecified. The accounts for 1919 show the company’s auditors as Stokes Bros. & Pim of Dublin, precursors of KPMG, and the auditor’s report shifts to the language of a “true and correct view”, language familiar in the modern era.
Following the partition of Ireland in 1921, one of the most significant findings is related to the fact that the L&LSRC now operated across a newly created international border, with its main depot barely two miles from the frontier. Yet its accounts provide evidence of simultaneous grant funding from both the Government of Northern Ireland and the Government of the Irish Free State to support its cross-border services through the 1920s and 1930s. This finding is interpreted as a challenge to the conventional view that there was no cooperation between the two jurisdictions in this period. The board of directors were ‘cross-community’ in composition, including both unionist and nationalist figures, and the cultural-cognitive dimension of the company’s identity appears to have contributed to its survival through periods of intense political tension.
The normative pillar of institutions (Scott, 2014) is perhaps related to the most dominant factor for the company’s longevity. Rather than competing with the existential threat posed by motor vehicles from the 1920s onward, the L&LSRC’s directors chose to embrace road transport, strategically pivoting the business model by acquiring omnibus services from 1929 and gradually shifting revenue from rail to road. As a result, by the late 1930s road transport accounted for most of both turnover and profit. The paper presents detailed tabulations from the accounts showing this transition year by year. By 1947, road services dominated the business, and the company’s final railway lines were closed that year, though bus operations continued until 2014. Overall, this paper makes a valuable contribution to the comparative international accounting history literature and to the study of railways (Edwards, 2010), combining careful archival work with a neo-institutionalist theoretical framework to produce a nuanced account of an unusual and historically significant organisation.
Accounting in Macardles Brewery in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries
This paper by Gibney offers an accounting history of Macardle Moore and Company, a family-owned brewery based in Dundalk, County Louth, from 1863 to 1915. The paper is explicitly positioned as a traditional accounting history, by providing an economic narrative drawing on archival records rather than to interpret accounting through a sociological or political theoretical lens (Funnell, 1996). It draws on records held at the Louth County Archives, and other sources, including wills, newspaper archives, and company registration documents.
Macardles was one of the notable manufacturing firms in operation at the time of Irish independence and Dundalk one of three major brewing centres in Ireland at the turn of the 20th century, alongside Dublin and Cork. Dundalk’s location as a railway junction, and the brewery’s direct access to rail connections, gave Macardles logistical advantages. The business had been in existence in various forms since at least 1859, and the partnership between the Macardle and Moore families (cousins who were prominent in business, civic, and political life) was formalised in 1863, with profits shared in the ratio of two-thirds to Edward Macardle and one-third to Andrew Moore. Both partners died in 1887, and the partnership continued under their widows and representatives until conversion to a limited liability company in 1895, when Macardle, Moore and Company Limited was incorporated with a nominal share capital of £40,000.
The paper examines the process of incorporation in some detail. A copy of Palmer’s 1890 guide to converting businesses to limited liability companies was found in the Macardles archive, with pages on share transfers highlighted, providing direct evidence of the guidance consulted by the family. The articles of association appointed Margaret Macardle (widow of the founder) as the first chairperson and managing director, at a salary of £200 per annum, with protection against removal except by special resolution at an extraordinary general meeting. She remained in these roles until her death aged 90 in 1921. Despite this long and active service, her occupation was recorded on her death registration as “Widow of a brewer”. The family’s determination to maintain the business as a private family company is evident in amendments made to its articles in 1908, incorporating the provisions of the Companies Act 1907 and limiting the number of shareholders to a maximum of 50, prohibiting any offering of shares or debentures to the public, and restricting share transfers. The directors’ attendance book, covering almost 15 years and 212 meetings, bears the signature of Margaret Macardle as a frequent and evidently active participant in governance.
The paper’s analysis of the available accounts for 1909, 1912, 1914, and 1915 reveals a business that was consistently profitable, debt-free, and which generated healthy cash reserves, with a stable dividend policy of 10% of issued share capital supplemented by occasional bonus dividends. The profit and loss accounts do not disclose turnover or sales figures (there was no legal obligation to do so until 1986) but they do show brewing profits, income from house rents and investments, and the deduction of directors’ and auditors’ fees, commission on profits, and depreciation. The balance sheets are healthy throughout the period. The 1915 accounts reveal an increase in brewing profits, apparently connected to wartime demand, which is offset by significant write-downs of assets and reductions in reserves, consistent with the directors’ stated intention to undertake a complete re-evaluation of assets in light of an uncertain future for the brewing trade during World War I. The 1915 accounts also contain a hand-written adjustment relating to the newly enacted excess profits duty, the first British and Irish corporation tax of general application (de Cogan, 2013), providing a direct link between the company’s records and a landmark development in fiscal policy.
In terms of contribution, the paper focuses on the archival records of a private as opposed to a public company and integrates the accounting history of Macardles with the development of financial reporting in the 20th century. The paper considers brewery accounting manuals (Walkden, 1891; Wilkinson, 1912) and assesses the Macardles accounts against both these and reporting standards of the era and later developments in financial reporting (Clarke & Gardner, 2004). It also draws on the influential concept of the personally managed enterprise and debates in the business history literature about the governance and performance of British family firms (Chandler, 1994). The paper reveals that Macardles largely operated along the lines of brewery accounting practices as set out by Walkden (1891) and Wilkinson (1912) and that its accounts were comparable to other similar companies. The paper also highlights the efforts of the Macardles family to retain it as a family-controlled business, or a personally managed enterprise, as regards governance and management style (Chandler, 1994).
Concluding Remarks
The four papers in this special issue are united by a commitment to recovering dimensions of accounting history that have been overlooked or underexplored, and the idea that understanding how accounting has been practised and understood in the past offers genuine insight into its present forms and purposes. Taken together, they demonstrate that accounting history in an Irish context still has much to contribute. The eschatological roots of accountability, the financial governance of Victorian public utilities, the survival of a cross-community railway company through decades of political upheaval, and the accounting practices of a provincial family brewery, are not marginal stories. They are part of the broader history of how human societies have organised, recorded, and rendered accounts of their activities and their obligations. As the Editors of this special issue, we hope that these papers will encourage further submissions to AFGR in the area of accounting history, and that the conversations they have opened will continue in the journal. The field of Irish accounting history, as these papers amply demonstrate, remains a rich and largely unmapped territory. It has many archival resources awaiting the attention of curious and theoretically informed scholars.