Social and Personal

Following the Partition of Ireland in 1921, the column covered the Governor-General of the Irish Free State and Governor of Northern Ireland, with entries placed, as for the Lord Lieutenant, below entries about the Royal Family. The 1937 Constitution of Ireland established the office of President of Ireland, whose holder should "take precedence over all other persons in the State".[1] The Fianna Fáil government criticised the column for listing President Douglas Hyde's engagements after those of the Royal Family and others, including leading members of the former Protestant Ascendancy — what Frank Aiken called "every hyphenated person in the country".[2] The agreed solution was to place items about the President elsewhere in the paper.[3] In 1942 the government used its wartime censorship powers to remove the column altogether, on the grounds that it compromised the state's neutrality.[4]

Following the declaration of the Republic in 1949 the column ceased to mention British royalty and gradually abandoned mentioning aristocracy. The name was changed to "Social and Personal". Until around 1978 it published a daily list of who met the President of Ireland in Áras an Uachtaráin. The reasons why it stopped doing this remain unclear. The then President, Patrick Hillery suggested that the paper stopped publishing information being supplied to it. The paper insisted that it stopped receiving information from the Áras.

Today the column only makes an occasional appearance, to enable a prominent (rarely titled) family to announce forthcoming nuptials. Whereas once the column received extensive space daily, gets one or two inches of space on the "Letters to the Editor" page if space allows, and contains often only contains one entry and frequently goes for weeks without being published at all.