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The workhouse – an unworkable solution to Irish poverty
There is no doubt about it, the workhouse, whose structure was a blot on the Irish landscape, was the most feared and hated institution in the terrified imaginations of the Irish poor. They would do anything to avoid submitting to that hellish last resort with its harsh rules and inhumane regimes, and that included dying of starvation during the Great Famine of 1845 to 1852. The nine to eleven feet high external walls conveyed a message of enter at your peril.
The men (and they were all men who considered themselves to be ‘gentlemen’) who drew up the legislation and plans to divide Ireland into Poor Law unions, were disciples of people like Jeremy Bentham and supporters of Lord John Russell who fully bought into that shameful ideology of laissez faire as a way of managing a country. These Poor Law Unions went completely against the old parish systems and county boundaries. The hastily constructed forbidding stone edifices were deemed fit for so many Irish who could never be other than almost destitute due to the proscriptive laws and practices of their English masters and landlords.
Bentham’s notorious 1796 publication Management of the Poor looks Trumpian in its crassness. He suggested floating a huge National Charity company with as many shareholders as possible, to build a chain of 250 enormous workhouses throughout England to accommodate up to one million paupers. He recommended the most frugal of feeding and housing arrangements with a strict work regime. Diet, clothing and bedding was costed to an alarmingly stringent degree. Human beings were commodified as mere moveable and dispensable stockroom items. At one level, Bentham’s ‘yellow pack’ solution was frighteningly modern with, as John O’Connor in his classic book The Workhouses of Ireland: The Fate of Ireland’s Poor describes, its ‘combination of nationalising and privatising the poor,’ the bottom line being to make profits for the shareholders. Margaret Thatcher’s privatisation of utilities companies in the nineteen eighties, leaving customers to the mercies of the free market, springs to mind. One more quirky feature of Bentham’s Management of the Poor is that it was published in Dublin by one James Moore.
We all learnt about the workhouse at some stage of our education when we studied the Great Famine, or we read about workhouses in Victorian literature, most famously in Charles’ Dickens Oliver Twist where young Oliver prevails, or Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd where poor Fanny Robin leaves Casterbridge Union House (which, incidentally was based on Dorchester workhouse) in a plain elm coffin. The workhouse had few redeeming features in fact or in fiction.
The population of Ireland, which sat at six and a half million in 1820, was on the eve of the Famine likely creeping close to nine million, and as such, it was one of the most densely populated countries in Europe, and this despite the fact that the burgeoning poor were officially disenfranchised, marginalised and penalised at every turn. The corrosion of the Irish peasant began in earnest with the Reformation, the plantations and the Penal Laws, reducing them to dependence on one subsistence crop and leaving them as expendable pawns in a fight for survival that would rival that modern dystopia portrayed in The Hunger Games.[1]
Following the suppression of the monasteries in 1535, the one and only nationwide support system for the sick and the poor came to an end. The precarious situation of the Irish peasant was compounded by the Tudor plantations in Munster and the Ulster Plantation following the Flight of the Earls in 1617, which dispossessed the native Irish. The cruellest blow was the Cromwellian plantations where the dispossessed of all classes were ordered by Cromwell to go to ‘Hell or to Connaught,’ a province that would later suffer more than any other from the privations of the Great Famine. After the Battle of the Boyne barred Catholics, once and for all, from regaining possession of their land, and because Catholics were now barred by law from purchasing land, they were forced to subdivide land among sons as they got married. And so, by the time we reach 1845, the peasants have been ground down by state sanctioned racism and bigotry to a hand to mouth existence with nothing to look forward to but the next wedding or the next birth, or perhaps eternal paradise if you were religious. It was indeed a grim existence. I am not, by the way, suggesting that Irish peasants, up to this, lived an ideal existence. They were of course always under the thumb of some overlord; the difference now was that they had no rights.
Notwithstanding, as efforts to address poverty in England came within the legal remit of the authorities, the impact of some of these measures, or versions of them, would come to be felt in Ireland also. While it’s true that the 1601 Poor Relief Act did not apply to Ireland, it was the start of a system that would eventually hold sway in Ireland – that of making the better-off contribute to the welfare of their less well-off neighbours, in other words, property paying for poverty. One interesting objective of the act was to consign to a House of Correction ‘those who refused or spoilt work or went abroad begging or lived idly.’ John O’Connor in The Workhouses of Ireland[2] reminds us that the 1601 Act set the scene for the routine treatment of the poor as ‘a thriftless section of society, to be feared, strictly controlled, and, where necessary, punished.’ During the eighteenth century, O’Connor informs us, Houses of Industry were authorised by law, but they were only established in Dublin (1703) and Cork (1735) and their chief objective seems to have been proselytizing. Following the 1798 Rebellion, the Act of Union of 1800 took away the last semblance of the albeit ineffectual autonomy Ireland had. Now ruled from Westminster, where laissez faire and the spirit of Bentham prevailed, things would only get worse for the Irish peasant.
But the genesis of the workhouse system, O’Connor explains, was to be found in the Act of 1772, which incorporated what became known as the ‘workhouse test.’ The Act said that ‘no poor who refuse to be lodged and kept in such houses shall be entitled to parochial relief.’ This question of outdoor relief would raise its head again at the height of the Famine, an intransigent all or nothing approach that resulted in many needless deaths. A subsequent Act of 1782 was the first to use the dreaded term ‘union’ whereby parishes would combine into a union to build a workhouse, although this did not yet apply to Ireland.
A Royal Commission of 1832 was charged with discovering workable solutions to poor relief, but again, Ireland was excluded. The 1834 report resulting from this commission, drafted by Sir Edwin Chadwick, a disciple of Bentham and economist, Nassau W. Senior, was getting closer and closer to the Victorian workhouse we are familiar with. The report highlighted the problem of supporting the able-bodied poor, suggesting that outdoor relief be replaced with accommodation in workhouses for these able-bodied as well as the aged, the infirm, and children. The report also recommended that Unions be administered by Boards of Guardians who would oversee the running of the workhouses. The sting in the tail of the 1834 Act was that the able-bodied poor would only be offered relief as workhouse inmates; this was as yet, down the road for Ireland, but she would not have too long to wait.
In 1830 a committee was charged with taking ‘into consideration the state of the poorer classes in Ireland, and the best means of improving their condition.’ One of the remedies this 1830 Committee proposed was that the poverty stricken emigrate to England; they had in fact already started, since they knew that they would be guaranteed some class of food, clothing and shelter under the English poor law system, a system that did not yet exist in Ireland. The Boards of Guardians in England could not cope with the numbers arriving from Ireland. This indeed was the trigger that encouraged the government to eventually look seriously at establishing a poor law system in Ireland. Yet another Royal Commission was appointed and when it presented its findings in 1836 it reported its belief that the English workhouse system would be unsuitable for Ireland. The reason given was that the English workhouse was designed to push the indolent able-bodied into finding jobs of which there were plenty in industrial England; the able-bodied Irish poor, on the other hand, were more than willing to work but there were no employment opportunities for them. The report also recognised that ‘the (Irish) able-bodied and their families would endure any misery rather than make a workhouse their domicile.’ To increase the employment prospects of the poor the Commission recommended the establishment of a Board of Improvement and Development which put forward several enlightened and forward-thinking ideas including the development of trade, manufactures, fisheries and mining. But Lord John Russel, that infamous disciple of laissez faire, felt that the Commission’s recommendations were all a bit too enlightened and generous. He sent English Poor Law Commissioner, George Nicholls, on a recce mission to Ireland.
Like Russell, Nicholls also rejected the Commission report and recommended the English poor law system for Ireland. This was a bizarre decision when you consider that the philosophy behind the workhouse system was that the inmates should in all respects ‘be worse situated, worse clothed, worse lodged and worse fed than independent labourers of the district.’ The Irish peasants were already poorly clothed, terribly underfed and living in hovels not fit for animals, and consequently would never benefit from a workhouse because they just couldn’t be any worse off. Furthermore, before Nicholls embarked on his six-week tour of Ireland, he visited several workhouses in London that had large Irish contingents. Here he learnt that the Irish had an intense dislike of workhouses, and only saw them as a last resort. Notwithstanding, he ploughed ahead and suggested using the English system where the discipline, confinement and deprivation would repel all but the most desperate. As in England, outdoor relief was also forbidden in Ireland and the error of this would horrifically materialise during the Famine.
But of course, laissez faire or its more modern permutation, neo-liberalism, was an evil shadow lurking behind the entire poor relief system. O’Connor, in The Workhouses of Ireland explains the true reasoning behind the scheme. ‘Nicholls and the advocates of the workhouse system were ……. only concerned to relieve the most extreme destitution, and in the process detach the peasant from the soil to facilitate landlordism.’ Once the workhouses were in situ, landlords could, with impunity, and some twisted version of a clear conscience, evict the tenants of subdivided smallholdings. It suited them of course, to believe that those troublesome tenants would be much better cared for in the workhouse, and how convenient for them to have all that acreage cleared.
But many people disagreed with Nicholls’ plan, mainly because it was in direct contravention of the most recent Commission which had made so many practical suggestions for creating employment and harnessing natural resources for the benefit of communities. The Irish in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, Catholic and Protestant from North and South, objected to it. Daniel O’Connell responded, ‘What is now suggested is that a country unable to give employment to its labourers should be made to feed them in idleness within the walls of a poor-house.’ And remember that these very labourers desperately wanted to work. Even the rapacious landlords were not enamoured by the idea of having to pay poor rates to finance the workhouses.
But the objections were all to no avail, and the Act for the Relief of the Destitute Poor in Ireland became law in July 1838. Almost a carbon copy of the English model, the only difference was that the Irish poor were not legally entitled to relief. Now Ireland would be divided into 130 Unions managed by Boards of Guardians (who were of course property-owning rate payers), with workhouses in each Union, all financed by the imposition of poor rates on the better off residents levied by the Boards of Guardians. With no outdoor relief, all classes of poor people were treated the same on becoming inmates of the workhouse, hence the deserving poor who were willing to work if the employment was available, remained in their wretched conditions rather than succumbing to the workhouse regime. Consequently, the Act for the Relief of the Destitute Poor, only provided relief in a very limited way for the most helpless in society who were incapable of looking after themselves. William J Smyth in The Atlas of the Great Irish Famine[3] perfectly describes a workhouse system being governed by ‘an economic philosophy that placed parsimonious accounting above human life.’
The workhouse buildings were basic, cold and forbidding. The Commission who employed George Wilkinson, the architect, to design and oversee the building of the workhouses, told him, ‘The style of building is intended to be of the cheapest description compatible with durability.’ Not surprisingly then, each Irish workhouse cost only two-thirds of a similar workhouse in England or Wales, a saving achieved by the most elemental construction outside and inside. Homely there were not, with unplastered lime walls and clay floors. One of the most sinister design features were the sleeping arrangements, comprised of raised platforms with straw mattresses on either side of a gangway and disturbingly resonant of slave ships and concentrations camps. Add to this the regimentation of striped uniforms, unpaid forced labour, roll call every morning, and two meals a day eaten in silence – for adults consisting mainly of stirabout, potatoes and skimmed milk. Reading the regime of life in the workhouse is like reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
The only way a whole family could qualify for relief was if they entered the workhouse together. Parents and children were then separated into male and female quarters and children over two years were separated from their parents, another practice resonant of concentration camps. The inhumanity of this practice meant that at the height of the Famine, parents often would not know if their children had died, or children would not know if their parents had died.
By the height of the Famine of course, even these harsh arrangements would descend into an impossibly hopeless scenario. The dead and the dying would be hardly distinguishable from each other, having no protection in overcrowding from the contagion of famine fever, dysentery, and typhus. An uncontrollable tide of deaths required a tough solution; special carts carried the corpses to mass pauper graves in the workhouse grounds where they were dropped in and quickly covered with lime. In many instances, reusable mobile coffins with sliding bottoms were employed. William J Smyth[4] shows us the shocking escalation of deaths. Between 1842 and 1845 the average number of deaths per year in workhouses was 4,944. In 1846 this figure rose to 14,662. In 1847, the worst year for workhouse deaths, it was 68,890.
By August 1846 the workhouses were still only half full, with 43,000 inmates, but they would quickly become overwhelmed. By March 1847 all 130 workhouses were full, with 115,000 inmates. The peak year of 1851 reported 217,000 inmates in a system that was designed to cater for 80,000 people; workhouses designed to cater for hundreds were now catering for thousands. O’Connor gives the example of Fermoy workhouse designed for 800 and forced to accommodate 1, 800. Proud peasants were no longer eschewing the workhouses, they were clamouring to get in, many dying on the way there or on the way back after being refused entry, hence the road to the workhouse being called casan na marbh (pathway of death). One of the most tragic examples occurred in 1849 when more than 200 men, women and children were refused any kind of assistance at the workhouse in Louisburgh, County Mayo. Many of them died from starvation and exposure on the mountainous homeward journey, referred to in local folklore as ‘the trail of tears.’
A system with no outdoor relief could only fall apart under such stress. The Temporary Relief Destitute Persons Act, also known as the Soup Kitchen Act, was hurried through in 1847, providing, as O’Connor describes, ‘not so much soup for the poor as poor soup.’ Alexis Soyer, celebrity chef to the Reform Club in London, devised a soup recipe that could be produced for three farthings a quart. His model kitchen in Dublin was a fringe show for the wealthy who came along to watch the poor eat the soup. The Dublin Evening Packet wryly reported on the proceedings. ‘For the privilege of watching the hungry eat, the gentry were expected to donate five shillings each…Five shillings each to see paupers feed! Five shillings! When the animals in the Zoological Gardens can be inspected at feeding time for sixpence.’
Eventually, outdoor relief was authorised in June 1847, but there was a sting in its tail called the Gregory Clause, or the quarter acre clause. A starving person who occupied more than one quarter of an acre would get neither indoor nor outdoor relief. The choice was stark; give your patch of land to your landlord or starve. This clause resulted in thousands of unnecessary deaths. But it was never simple; once the soup kitchens were introduced approximately 700,000 people were discharged from public works, their only means of income to buy food.
One way of avoiding leaving the workhouse on the back of a cart in a reusable coffin was to consider emigration, and the Government did assist emigration schemes. Here’s how it worked. Representatives of the Emigration Commission visited every workhouse in Ireland to ascertain those suitable for emigration. Those inmates who were deemed suitable were offered a free passage, supplied with suitable clothing and given enough money to get them started on arrival in Canada, America or Australia. Many landlords also took advantage of the scheme to clear their lands, some hiring fraudulent agents who chartered ships that were totally unsuitable, took the fares and dangerously overcrowded them. We can see this happening so often today with boats coming out of Libya especially, crowded with emigrants from Africa looking for refuge in Europe. But the risk of travelling on ‘coffin ships’ with their shocking reputations was more preferable for the Irish peasant, than going to the workhouse.
The Great Famine subsided, and life went on in a country whose population was decimated. The poor were still poor, and they still needed practical help, but this was not forthcoming from a colonising administration and a class of self-absorbed and arrogant landlords. Always the second-class country, the next shout out for the peasants would be the Land Wars of the 1870s.
By the end of the nineteenth century, workhouses became more benevolent places, largely due to the employment of the religious from 1861. The diet improved considerably, and inmates were even allowed rations of tobacco and snuff. With the Old Age Pensions Act in 1908, fewer old people needed to resort to the workhouse. After Independence in 1921, the workhouses became County Homes, County Hospitals and District or Fever Hospitals and the remainder were closed. Following the Irish Government’s Hospitals Commission of 1933, new hospitals and homes part-funded by the Hospitals’ Sweepstakes emerged. And here’s a salutary lesson relating to the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstakes as described by Stephen Dodd in an Irish Independent article dated December 7th 2003. “The Irish Sweeps, touted around the world as a charity launched to help a nascent health care system, has long been exposed as one of the country's greatest scandals. Of the millions that poured in, it has been estimated that less than one tenth went to hospitals. The remainder turned rich men into multimillionaires and created law enforcement problems on both sides of the Atlantic.” Neoliberalism at its worst, you might agree, and the perpetrators were not our colonisers.
Most former workhouse buildings were demolished except for the South Dublin Union, occupied incidentally by the Irish Volunteers Fourth Battalion in Easter Week 1916. Its modern reincarnation is now St James’s Hospital. In 1916 of course, the grounds still housed several workhouses alongside hospital buildings, accommodating over 3,200 inmates. And isn’t it interesting that to this very day, you will still hear very elderly people in Dublin call St James’ Hospital the ‘union’.
Perhaps we should remember the indignities of the workhouse in Ireland’s history when we hear stories today from Direct Provision Centres for immigrants in Ireland. Let us not repeat the mistakes visited on us when we were the under the rule of a more powerful and affluent neighbour.
[1] By Suzanne Collins
[2] 1995. Anvil Books.
[3] 2012. Cork University Press.
[4] Section lll The Creation of the Workhouse System
The workhouse – an unworkable solution to Irish poverty
There is no doubt about it, the workhouse, whose structure was a blot on the Irish landscape, was the most feared and hated institution in the terrified imaginations of the Irish poor. They would do anything to avoid submitting to that hellish last resort with its harsh rules and inhumane regimes, and that included dying of starvation during the Great Famine of 1845 to 1852. The nine to eleven feet high external walls conveyed a message of enter at your peril.
The men (and they were all men who considered themselves to be ‘gentlemen’) who drew up the legislation and plans to divide Ireland into Poor Law unions, were disciples of people like Jeremy Bentham and supporters of Lord John Russell who fully bought into that shameful ideology of laissez faire as a way of managing a country. These Poor Law Unions went completely against the old parish systems and county boundaries. The hastily constructed forbidding stone edifices were deemed fit for so many Irish who could never be other than almost destitute due to the proscriptive laws and practices of their English masters and landlords.
Bentham’s notorious 1796 publication Management of the Poor looks Trumpian in its crassness. He suggested floating a huge National Charity company with as many shareholders as possible, to build a chain of 250 enormous workhouses throughout England to accommodate up to one million paupers. He recommended the most frugal of feeding and housing arrangements with a strict work regime. Diet, clothing and bedding was costed to an alarmingly stringent degree. Human beings were commodified as mere moveable and dispensable stockroom items. At one level, Bentham’s ‘yellow pack’ solution was frighteningly modern with, as John O’Connor in his classic book The Workhouses of Ireland: The Fate of Ireland’s Poor describes, its ‘combination of nationalising and privatising the poor,’ the bottom line being to make profits for the shareholders. Margaret Thatcher’s privatisation of utilities companies in the nineteen eighties, leaving customers to the mercies of the free market, springs to mind. One more quirky feature of Bentham’s Management of the Poor is that it was published in Dublin by one James Moore.
We all learnt about the workhouse at some stage of our education when we studied the Great Famine, or we read about workhouses in Victorian literature, most famously in Charles’ Dickens Oliver Twist where young Oliver prevails, or Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd where poor Fanny Robin leaves Casterbridge Union House (which, incidentally was based on Dorchester workhouse) in a plain elm coffin. The workhouse had few redeeming features in fact or in fiction.
The population of Ireland, which sat at six and a half million in 1820, was on the eve of the Famine likely creeping close to nine million, and as such, it was one of the most densely populated countries in Europe, and this despite the fact that the burgeoning poor were officially disenfranchised, marginalised and penalised at every turn. The corrosion of the Irish peasant began in earnest with the Reformation, the plantations and the Penal Laws, reducing them to dependence on one subsistence crop and leaving them as expendable pawns in a fight for survival that would rival that modern dystopia portrayed in The Hunger Games.[1]
Following the suppression of the monasteries in 1535, the one and only nationwide support system for the sick and the poor came to an end. The precarious situation of the Irish peasant was compounded by the Tudor plantations in Munster and the Ulster Plantation following the Flight of the Earls in 1617, which dispossessed the native Irish. The cruellest blow was the Cromwellian plantations where the dispossessed of all classes were ordered by Cromwell to go to ‘Hell or to Connaught,’ a province that would later suffer more than any other from the privations of the Great Famine. After the Battle of the Boyne barred Catholics, once and for all, from regaining possession of their land, and because Catholics were now barred by law from purchasing land, they were forced to subdivide land among sons as they got married. And so, by the time we reach 1845, the peasants have been ground down by state sanctioned racism and bigotry to a hand to mouth existence with nothing to look forward to but the next wedding or the next birth, or perhaps eternal paradise if you were religious. It was indeed a grim existence. I am not, by the way, suggesting that Irish peasants, up to this, lived an ideal existence. They were of course always under the thumb of some overlord; the difference now was that they had no rights.
Notwithstanding, as efforts to address poverty in England came within the legal remit of the authorities, the impact of some of these measures, or versions of them, would come to be felt in Ireland also. While it’s true that the 1601 Poor Relief Act did not apply to Ireland, it was the start of a system that would eventually hold sway in Ireland – that of making the better-off contribute to the welfare of their less well-off neighbours, in other words, property paying for poverty. One interesting objective of the act was to consign to a House of Correction ‘those who refused or spoilt work or went abroad begging or lived idly.’ John O’Connor in The Workhouses of Ireland[2] reminds us that the 1601 Act set the scene for the routine treatment of the poor as ‘a thriftless section of society, to be feared, strictly controlled, and, where necessary, punished.’ During the eighteenth century, O’Connor informs us, Houses of Industry were authorised by law, but they were only established in Dublin (1703) and Cork (1735) and their chief objective seems to have been proselytizing. Following the 1798 Rebellion, the Act of Union of 1800 took away the last semblance of the albeit ineffectual autonomy Ireland had. Now ruled from Westminster, where laissez faire and the spirit of Bentham prevailed, things would only get worse for the Irish peasant.
But the genesis of the workhouse system, O’Connor explains, was to be found in the Act of 1772, which incorporated what became known as the ‘workhouse test.’ The Act said that ‘no poor who refuse to be lodged and kept in such houses shall be entitled to parochial relief.’ This question of outdoor relief would raise its head again at the height of the Famine, an intransigent all or nothing approach that resulted in many needless deaths. A subsequent Act of 1782 was the first to use the dreaded term ‘union’ whereby parishes would combine into a union to build a workhouse, although this did not yet apply to Ireland.
A Royal Commission of 1832 was charged with discovering workable solutions to poor relief, but again, Ireland was excluded. The 1834 report resulting from this commission, drafted by Sir Edwin Chadwick, a disciple of Bentham and economist, Nassau W. Senior, was getting closer and closer to the Victorian workhouse we are familiar with. The report highlighted the problem of supporting the able-bodied poor, suggesting that outdoor relief be replaced with accommodation in workhouses for these able-bodied as well as the aged, the infirm, and children. The report also recommended that Unions be administered by Boards of Guardians who would oversee the running of the workhouses. The sting in the tail of the 1834 Act was that the able-bodied poor would only be offered relief as workhouse inmates; this was as yet, down the road for Ireland, but she would not have too long to wait.
In 1830 a committee was charged with taking ‘into consideration the state of the poorer classes in Ireland, and the best means of improving their condition.’ One of the remedies this 1830 Committee proposed was that the poverty stricken emigrate to England; they had in fact already started, since they knew that they would be guaranteed some class of food, clothing and shelter under the English poor law system, a system that did not yet exist in Ireland. The Boards of Guardians in England could not cope with the numbers arriving from Ireland. This indeed was the trigger that encouraged the government to eventually look seriously at establishing a poor law system in Ireland. Yet another Royal Commission was appointed and when it presented its findings in 1836 it reported its belief that the English workhouse system would be unsuitable for Ireland. The reason given was that the English workhouse was designed to push the indolent able-bodied into finding jobs of which there were plenty in industrial England; the able-bodied Irish poor, on the other hand, were more than willing to work but there were no employment opportunities for them. The report also recognised that ‘the (Irish) able-bodied and their families would endure any misery rather than make a workhouse their domicile.’ To increase the employment prospects of the poor the Commission recommended the establishment of a Board of Improvement and Development which put forward several enlightened and forward-thinking ideas including the development of trade, manufactures, fisheries and mining. But Lord John Russel, that infamous disciple of laissez faire, felt that the Commission’s recommendations were all a bit too enlightened and generous. He sent English Poor Law Commissioner, George Nicholls, on a recce mission to Ireland.
Like Russell, Nicholls also rejected the Commission report and recommended the English poor law system for Ireland. This was a bizarre decision when you consider that the philosophy behind the workhouse system was that the inmates should in all respects ‘be worse situated, worse clothed, worse lodged and worse fed than independent labourers of the district.’ The Irish peasants were already poorly clothed, terribly underfed and living in hovels not fit for animals, and consequently would never benefit from a workhouse because they just couldn’t be any worse off. Furthermore, before Nicholls embarked on his six-week tour of Ireland, he visited several workhouses in London that had large Irish contingents. Here he learnt that the Irish had an intense dislike of workhouses, and only saw them as a last resort. Notwithstanding, he ploughed ahead and suggested using the English system where the discipline, confinement and deprivation would repel all but the most desperate. As in England, outdoor relief was also forbidden in Ireland and the error of this would horrifically materialise during the Famine.
But of course, laissez faire or its more modern permutation, neo-liberalism, was an evil shadow lurking behind the entire poor relief system. O’Connor, in The Workhouses of Ireland explains the true reasoning behind the scheme. ‘Nicholls and the advocates of the workhouse system were ……. only concerned to relieve the most extreme destitution, and in the process detach the peasant from the soil to facilitate landlordism.’ Once the workhouses were in situ, landlords could, with impunity, and some twisted version of a clear conscience, evict the tenants of subdivided smallholdings. It suited them of course, to believe that those troublesome tenants would be much better cared for in the workhouse, and how convenient for them to have all that acreage cleared.
But many people disagreed with Nicholls’ plan, mainly because it was in direct contravention of the most recent Commission which had made so many practical suggestions for creating employment and harnessing natural resources for the benefit of communities. The Irish in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, Catholic and Protestant from North and South, objected to it. Daniel O’Connell responded, ‘What is now suggested is that a country unable to give employment to its labourers should be made to feed them in idleness within the walls of a poor-house.’ And remember that these very labourers desperately wanted to work. Even the rapacious landlords were not enamoured by the idea of having to pay poor rates to finance the workhouses.
But the objections were all to no avail, and the Act for the Relief of the Destitute Poor in Ireland became law in July 1838. Almost a carbon copy of the English model, the only difference was that the Irish poor were not legally entitled to relief. Now Ireland would be divided into 130 Unions managed by Boards of Guardians (who were of course property-owning rate payers), with workhouses in each Union, all financed by the imposition of poor rates on the better off residents levied by the Boards of Guardians. With no outdoor relief, all classes of poor people were treated the same on becoming inmates of the workhouse, hence the deserving poor who were willing to work if the employment was available, remained in their wretched conditions rather than succumbing to the workhouse regime. Consequently, the Act for the Relief of the Destitute Poor, only provided relief in a very limited way for the most helpless in society who were incapable of looking after themselves. William J Smyth in The Atlas of the Great Irish Famine[3] perfectly describes a workhouse system being governed by ‘an economic philosophy that placed parsimonious accounting above human life.’
The workhouse buildings were basic, cold and forbidding. The Commission who employed George Wilkinson, the architect, to design and oversee the building of the workhouses, told him, ‘The style of building is intended to be of the cheapest description compatible with durability.’ Not surprisingly then, each Irish workhouse cost only two-thirds of a similar workhouse in England or Wales, a saving achieved by the most elemental construction outside and inside. Homely there were not, with unplastered lime walls and clay floors. One of the most sinister design features were the sleeping arrangements, comprised of raised platforms with straw mattresses on either side of a gangway and disturbingly resonant of slave ships and concentrations camps. Add to this the regimentation of striped uniforms, unpaid forced labour, roll call every morning, and two meals a day eaten in silence – for adults consisting mainly of stirabout, potatoes and skimmed milk. Reading the regime of life in the workhouse is like reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
The only way a whole family could qualify for relief was if they entered the workhouse together. Parents and children were then separated into male and female quarters and children over two years were separated from their parents, another practice resonant of concentration camps. The inhumanity of this practice meant that at the height of the Famine, parents often would not know if their children had died, or children would not know if their parents had died.
By the height of the Famine of course, even these harsh arrangements would descend into an impossibly hopeless scenario. The dead and the dying would be hardly distinguishable from each other, having no protection in overcrowding from the contagion of famine fever, dysentery, and typhus. An uncontrollable tide of deaths required a tough solution; special carts carried the corpses to mass pauper graves in the workhouse grounds where they were dropped in and quickly covered with lime. In many instances, reusable mobile coffins with sliding bottoms were employed. William J Smyth[4] shows us the shocking escalation of deaths. Between 1842 and 1845 the average number of deaths per year in workhouses was 4,944. In 1846 this figure rose to 14,662. In 1847, the worst year for workhouse deaths, it was 68,890.
By August 1846 the workhouses were still only half full, with 43,000 inmates, but they would quickly become overwhelmed. By March 1847 all 130 workhouses were full, with 115,000 inmates. The peak year of 1851 reported 217,000 inmates in a system that was designed to cater for 80,000 people; workhouses designed to cater for hundreds were now catering for thousands. O’Connor gives the example of Fermoy workhouse designed for 800 and forced to accommodate 1, 800. Proud peasants were no longer eschewing the workhouses, they were clamouring to get in, many dying on the way there or on the way back after being refused entry, hence the road to the workhouse being called casan na marbh (pathway of death). One of the most tragic examples occurred in 1849 when more than 200 men, women and children were refused any kind of assistance at the workhouse in Louisburgh, County Mayo. Many of them died from starvation and exposure on the mountainous homeward journey, referred to in local folklore as ‘the trail of tears.’
A system with no outdoor relief could only fall apart under such stress. The Temporary Relief Destitute Persons Act, also known as the Soup Kitchen Act, was hurried through in 1847, providing, as O’Connor describes, ‘not so much soup for the poor as poor soup.’ Alexis Soyer, celebrity chef to the Reform Club in London, devised a soup recipe that could be produced for three farthings a quart. His model kitchen in Dublin was a fringe show for the wealthy who came along to watch the poor eat the soup. The Dublin Evening Packet wryly reported on the proceedings. ‘For the privilege of watching the hungry eat, the gentry were expected to donate five shillings each…Five shillings each to see paupers feed! Five shillings! When the animals in the Zoological Gardens can be inspected at feeding time for sixpence.’
Eventually, outdoor relief was authorised in June 1847, but there was a sting in its tail called the Gregory Clause, or the quarter acre clause. A starving person who occupied more than one quarter of an acre would get neither indoor nor outdoor relief. The choice was stark; give your patch of land to your landlord or starve. This clause resulted in thousands of unnecessary deaths. But it was never simple; once the soup kitchens were introduced approximately 700,000 people were discharged from public works, their only means of income to buy food.
One way of avoiding leaving the workhouse on the back of a cart in a reusable coffin was to consider emigration, and the Government did assist emigration schemes. Here’s how it worked. Representatives of the Emigration Commission visited every workhouse in Ireland to ascertain those suitable for emigration. Those inmates who were deemed suitable were offered a free passage, supplied with suitable clothing and given enough money to get them started on arrival in Canada, America or Australia. Many landlords also took advantage of the scheme to clear their lands, some hiring fraudulent agents who chartered ships that were totally unsuitable, took the fares and dangerously overcrowded them. We can see this happening so often today with boats coming out of Libya especially, crowded with emigrants from Africa looking for refuge in Europe. But the risk of travelling on ‘coffin ships’ with their shocking reputations was more preferable for the Irish peasant, than going to the workhouse.
The Great Famine subsided, and life went on in a country whose population was decimated. The poor were still poor, and they still needed practical help, but this was not forthcoming from a colonising administration and a class of self-absorbed and arrogant landlords. Always the second-class country, the next shout out for the peasants would be the Land Wars of the 1870s.
By the end of the nineteenth century, workhouses became more benevolent places, largely due to the employment of the religious from 1861. The diet improved considerably, and inmates were even allowed rations of tobacco and snuff. With the Old Age Pensions Act in 1908, fewer old people needed to resort to the workhouse. After Independence in 1921, the workhouses became County Homes, County Hospitals and District or Fever Hospitals and the remainder were closed. Following the Irish Government’s Hospitals Commission of 1933, new hospitals and homes part-funded by the Hospitals’ Sweepstakes emerged. And here’s a salutary lesson relating to the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstakes as described by Stephen Dodd in an Irish Independent article dated December 7th 2003. “The Irish Sweeps, touted around the world as a charity launched to help a nascent health care system, has long been exposed as one of the country's greatest scandals. Of the millions that poured in, it has been estimated that less than one tenth went to hospitals. The remainder turned rich men into multimillionaires and created law enforcement problems on both sides of the Atlantic.” Neoliberalism at its worst, you might agree, and the perpetrators were not our colonisers.
Most former workhouse buildings were demolished except for the South Dublin Union, occupied incidentally by the Irish Volunteers Fourth Battalion in Easter Week 1916. Its modern reincarnation is now St James’s Hospital. In 1916 of course, the grounds still housed several workhouses alongside hospital buildings, accommodating over 3,200 inmates. And isn’t it interesting that to this very day, you will still hear very elderly people in Dublin call St James’ Hospital the ‘union’.
Perhaps we should remember the indignities of the workhouse in Ireland’s history when we hear stories today from Direct Provision Centres for immigrants in Ireland. Let us not repeat the mistakes visited on us when we were the under the rule of a more powerful and affluent neighbour.
[1] By Suzanne Collins
[2] 1995. Anvil Books.
[3] 2012. Cork University Press.
[4] Section lll The Creation of the Workhouse System
