FROM THE ARCHIVES:An anonymous correspondent described the workhouses which were once a feature of many Irish towns in this article from 1961. – JOE JOYCE
SOME PEOPLE have never seen those gaunt stone buildings in the country. Many have driven past them not knowing their history. They are not unlike prisons, not unlike hospitals. They were both, and yet neither. A century ago there were over a hundred of them in Ireland. They are of course the workhouses. Since 1922 there have been no workhouses as such, but the buildings remain: some have been adapted as county homes, others are used as factories and stores, many are abandoned and desolate.
They are found outside the larger country towns, each superbly sited, commanding the town and a cannon-shot away. The formidable buildings and the high walls show here and there evidence that they were designed and positioned to provide redoubts for the Crown forces should the native population – and there were eight millions at the time – revolt. It was only forty years after 1798 when they were built. But their primary object was to attempt to relieve the widespread destitution in Ireland. The urgent necessity for this relief can be judged from the fact that 163 of these large institutions, each to take about a thousand people, were built within three or four years. The country was covered with hordes of beggars wandering from place to place, gathering alms and spreading disease. Since the suppression of the monastic order by Henry Vlll and the consequent closing of the hospitals, vagrancy had become an acute problem in the two islands. The harshest laws devised by a harsh and hostile administration had failed to reduce their numbers, and eventually these comfortless workhouses were built . . .
Conditions in the workhouses were so designed that only dire necessity could drive a poor person to seek admission . . . The walls were unplastered and the rooms unceiled. The floors were rough and bare, the doors mere planks with latches and the stairs narrow, winding and of stone. The wards had a central sunken passage which served as a gangway. The inmates – the paupers – slept on the raised side portions on straw . . .
The workhouses continued as such until 1921 . . . As late as 1911 there were 145 workhouses functioning and these contained 41,000 people. During that year over 10,000 people died in workhouses . . . While the actual transfer took place in 1921, the wind of change had been blowing for some time. From Vice-Regal and other Commissions grew the idea of the county home – a place for the aged and infirm poor, and chronic invalids. Unfortunately when the old system was being changed in 1921 there was insufficient provision for many classes such as unmarried mothers and low-grade mental defectives. This made it inevitable that the county home, reserved in theory for the aged and chronics, was filled with a miscellaneous population, and thus it did not (until recently) lose the character of a general mixed workhouse.
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