JOURNAL OF THE IRISH LABOUR HISTORY SOCIETY

••• .".'. >. '~"ESSA YS IN REVIEW 47or otherwise altered to meet the requirements of a collapsing social framework. Thus the Irish poorescaped the corrosive effects of the Speenhamland system and clung to the vestiges of a shaken butpartiaUy-intact social network. The final threat to Irish deference came not from race~memory orpolitics or industrialisation but from the financial decrepitude of Irish landowners and the presence ofan over-large peasant population. I use the word 'presence' advisedly since historians have still todecide whether the population of pre-famine Ireland was increasing or decreasing.British interesi in solving their own poor-relief problems spilled over into Ireland only when Irishpoverty itself had begun seriously to spill into Britain. The economic crisis in Ireland from 1815onwards caused many Irish landowners to rationalise their estate-management in order to improve, orin some cases to bring about their viability: The resultant clearances fused with concurrent growth inthe efficiency of steamships, and large numbers ofIrish paupers suddenly became an immediate Britishproblem. 3 Parliamentary enquiries into the state of the Irish lower orders coincided with the aftermathsof two earlier famines of the nineteenth century, and as barometers of 'normal' poverty they aretherefore of limited value. Certainly the enquiries led to no immediate attempt at a solution. Thegovernment had responded to the two famines by setting up short-term ad hoc relief committees, oftenlocally administered. Events later in the century would show this to be a pattern fraught with fatalconsequences. In the first third of the century the connection between inadequate estate-managementand lower-class poverty had become obvious, but uncertainty prevailed for most of the Victorian periodwith regard to a solution. In the event, discussions on a compulsory poor law for Ireland arose less froma desire to assist the poor than from a conviction that Irish property-owners should pay for Irish poverty;a law of settlement was aimed at rather than the relief of the poor.And so it was that the British and Irish authorities spent part of the 1830s in examining the variousoptions and approaches available regarding a poor law in the Irish environment. The report of a Select. Committee in 1830, valuable in its wealth of information but lacking in conclusiveness, led to a fullscaleRoyal Commission headed by the Archbishop of Dublin, Richard Whately, and rather weightedwith concerned Catholics. In the course of three extensive reports the commissioners rejected theworkhouse concept as inappropriate to a non-industrialised environment. The state ofIrish poverty wassuch that any outdoor relief system would, they believed, be ruinous. In a positive vein thecommissioners suggested emigration schemes, land reclamation and public works, all of which wouldnecessitate some degree of direct government intervention. 4 The commission had in fact cut its wayto some of the root-causes of poverty in Ireland and its recommendations were mechanical (thoughoccasionally imaginative) responses to those causes. The government's inevitable rejection of thecommissioners' proposals perhaps was rooted less in politics and economic theory than in a traditionalfailure to come to terms with the Irish environment.In the administrative sense the New Poor Law seemed a promising solution; the innovative nationalschool system had after all been successful in placing education where there had previously been none.B ut the replacement of poverty by industry and thrift proved less simple than had been anticipated. Thenew workhouses contained the sick, the mad, and children as well as able-bodied paupers. The poorlaw rhetoric echoed the belief that workhouse inmates were a new type of criminal being punished fortheir social inadequacies. Burke's account of the poor law in Ireland is the first full-length modemtreatment. One of its most interesting features is the tracing ofthe workhouse's progress from its cruderole as a social melting-pot in 1838 to its emergence as a surprisingly versatile health service later inthe century. Famine, administrative contradictions, changing social attitudes and other factors whichbrought about the expansion of the workhouse's facilities are charted by B urke with considerable skill.Despite the book's broad chronological expanse it is a work of impressive depth and is marred only bythe odd choice of the South Dublin Union as a 'typical' example of workhouse practice.One obvious historical conclusion to be drawn from Burke's researches (though not one spelt outin her book) is that the early poor law experience in Ireland represented the nadir of Irish poor reliefhistory. The workhouses when they opened signalled the absorption into the poor law system, andtherefore the closure, of several of the institutions which had until then catered for special categories