JOURNAL OF THE IRISH LABOUR HISTORY SOCIETY

Essays in ReviewCosherers, Wanderers and Vagabonds: The Treatment of thePoor and the Insane in IrelandHelen Burke,The People and the Poor Law in Nineteenth Century Ireland, (Women's EducationBureau, Dublin, 1987), pp. xiv & 369, £14.95 softbackJoseph Robins, Fools and Mad:A History of the Insane in Ireland, (Institute of Public Administration,Dublin, 1986), pp. 256, £14.95 hardbackFew facts are as well established in history as that the Irish were poverty-stricken in the eighteenthand nineteenth centuries. So apparently pervasive and widespread was the problem that the socialattitude (it was too early for such a word as 'policy') of successive Irish and British governments toIreland was defined very largely in terms of poverty and its relief. The impressionistic accounts ofArthur Young and other quasi-tourists of the late Georgian era gave way to the more statistic-basedresponse of the parliamentary enquiries as passive perception led to active concern. But theinterpretation by modem historians of Irish poverty in Georgian and Victorian times has mirrored theperceptions (and occasionally the attitudes) of those who assembled the original evidence. So clearand so voluble was the exposition of the facts that few, if any, historians have ever questioned themotives which underlay their assemblage or the manner and timing of their presentation. l The causesof Irish poverty were assiduously sought by concerned contemporaries, but no enquiry has yet exploredthe definition of poverty in its Irish context nor the extent to which it was identified and measured inrelation to British poverty or the prevailing concept thereof.Attempts at the control and regulation of poverty began in England with the parliamentary measureof 1601, a brave effort to both amalgamate and rationalise a plethora of local practices and earliermeasures. The 'old poor law' naturally reflected the needs and preferences of Englishmen as well asthe social and political environment in which Englishmen lived. The failure to apply the provisions ofthe 1601 act to Ireland was rooted, likewise, in Irish political realities. Any extension of Englishlegislation to Ireland depended on the degree to which it could be enforced. The few Irish statutespassed during the first half of the seventeenth century which could be said to relate to poverty revealprimarily the incompleteness of the conquest; but the various factors referred to therein as 'causes' ofpoverty had a significant effect on later developments. Irish ignorance of English agricultural practiceswas at the centre of the 1634 act 'to prevent the unprofitable custom of burning corn in the straw'.Allegedly, 'iII-husbandrie and improvident care' by native Irish farmers had led to an annual 'greatdearth of cattle'. That the negligence in question stemmed from 'a natural lazie disposition' and wastherefore categorically criminal is clear from the act's determination to punish rather than relieve theperpetrators, who were also of course the victims. Cure rather than prevention was also the focal pointof an act of the same year for 'the suppressing of cosherers and idle wanderers'. The ancient Irishpractice of coshering (the custom of claiming legitimate dues and of asserting the system of deference)was interpreted in the act as a type of banditry conducted by men who 'live idly and inordinately'. Menrecognised locally as legitimate chiefs of tuatha were equated with the lawless and problematic youngersons who roamed England in the generation before the Civil War. However inaccurate the designation,crime as well as improvident farming practices were identified at an early stage as prominent causesof poverty in Ireland.Crime was to remain a permanent feature of the British attitude to Irish poverty even into thetwentieth century. From the eighteenth century onwards education schemes, successful and otherwise,replaced punishment as a general remedy. But throughout the early modern period the continuingpolitical strife, together with the lack of control over 'remote' or Gaelic areas, retarded the absorption45