The focus of this study is the poor law system, and the people who used it. Modelled on the English poor law of 1834, the Irish Poor Relief Act of 1838 established a nationwide system of poor relief based on the workhouse and financed by a local property tax.¹ The poor law system remained the primary form of poor relief in Ireland until the 1920s, and in Northern Ireland until after the Second World War.² From its inception, the poor law was the focus of criticism and complaint. As the author of an anonymous pamphlet published in 1857 declared, the...

Pre-Famine Ireland was a country seemingly defined by poverty.¹ The condition of the people shocked travellers and reinforced a sense of a place that was separate, different and foreign, not an integral part of the United Kingdom. Writing in the late 1830s, French social and political commentator, Gustave de Beaumont remarked that misery, ‘naked and famishing’, was evident ‘everywhere, and at every hour of the day, it is the first thing you see when you land on the Irish coast, and from that moment it ceases not to be present to your view’. Irish poverty, de Beaumont asserted, had ‘a...

The impact of the Great Famine (1845–1850) was profound and shaped attitudes to relief long after the crisis had passed.¹ Workhouses became associated in the popular mind with death and disease, while outdoor relief became associated in the establishment mind with widespread abuse and fraudulent claims. The introduction of outdoor relief, together with other reforms introduced during the course of the Famine changed the way that the poor law system operated. Before examining the nature and extent of that change and in order to provide a context for the discussion that follows, it is necessary to give a brief...

In Ireland, even more so than in England, the workhouse dominates popular awareness of the poor law. Despite recent research that has highlighted the importance of outdoor relief and its significance as a political issue,¹ the workhouse remains the element with which people are most familiar and which is believed to define the system. The reason for this, as Snell has noted in relation to England, is two-fold.² The workhouse generated a mass of archival material and it was the focus of extensive commentary and debate. Officials were required to keep detailed records relating to the management of the workhouse...

The workhouse was central to the Irish poor law system. Any move to convert vacant workhouse buildings to other uses, Chief Commissioner Power insisted in 1859, would send out a very unfortunate message with regard to the poor law system as a whole. It should be remembered ‘above all things’, he observed, ‘that the whole poor law of an Irish union is concentrated in its workhouse; that the administration of relief in the union is good or bad according to the good or bad state of management of the workhouse’, and that state depended ‘on the strict enforcement of classification...

As the constituent elements of the workhouse population changed in the decades after 1860, so the character and function of the institution altered. As a British Medical Association Report on workhouses infirmaries noted in 1895, when the poor law was first introduced the sick were an ‘unimportant section’ of the workhouse population, ‘Now the able-bodied have almost vanished off the land, their place being taken by infirm and aged class, and the sick.’¹ The growing emphasis within the workhouse on specialised treatment mirrored developments in England.² Medical matters became a regular item on the agenda of boards of guardians and...

Many of those who turned to the poor law for assistance were people whose conduct or lifestyle had excluded them from respectable society. Unmarried mothers, prostitutes and vagrants all resorted to the workhouse on a regular basis. Over the second half of the nineteenth century, declining numbers of able-bodied inmates focused greater attention on these groups as they became more visible within workhouse populations. Poor law regulations required the relief of destitution irrespective of its cause or the character of the destitute person, much to the annoyance of many guardians, officials and ratepayers. As a member of the Galway Board...

Under the poor law system, relief was both targeted at and largely limited to the settled poor. Poor law guardians and officials sought to restrict relief as much as possible to local residents, regarding applicants who came from outside the union with suspicion and, in some cases, hostility. This is particularly evident with regard to vagrants. Vagrancy was perceived as a social problem from the early modern period. Widely associated with crime and social disorder, the mobile poor were viewed as dangerous and subversive. Vagrants were the epitome of the undeserving poor; people who could work but chose not to....

The poor law never acquired popular legitimacy in Ireland. It was too expensive, too inefficient, too associated with British rule and with memories of the Famine. Following independence, the workhouse system in the south was swept away as part of a reorganisation of local government and social welfare that saw the abolition of poor law boards and workhouses, and the introduction of home assistance administered by boards of health and public assistance. Workhouse buildings were generally converted into hospitals or county homes. The latter provided institutional care for the elderly and infirm, and chronic invalids, together with, in some cases,...