by Virginia Crossman, Oxford Brookes University

Workhouses are an immensely important part of Irish heritage. The campaign to restore Carrickmacross workhouse (featured in a recent post) is one of a number of community projects currently seeking to preserve, restore and utilize workhouse buildings. Reading about Carrickmacross campaign on the project website got me thinking about popular perceptions of the workhouse system and how these continue to be dominated by the long shadow of the Famine. The section on the history of Carrickmacross workhouse describes the establishment of the poor law system and the situation in and around the workhouse during the Famine. Focusing on that traumatic period, however, leaves little space to remember inmates who entered the workhouse in the decades after the Famine. The institution continued to give shelter to people until the 1920s, and these people also deserve attention. This omission highlights the very strong link between the Famine and the workhouse in popular history, and the general lack of awareness of developments in the post-Famine period, a gap which has only really begun to be addressed by professional historians in the last ten years.

The Famine was of course hugely important and it is absolutely right that emphasis should be placed on the experience of those who suffered and died in the workhouse during those terrible years. What happened during the Famine destroyed lives and families and devastated the local community. The events of the Famine were, moreover, felt long after the crisis was past, shaping how people thought about the workhouse and the poor law system more generally, and changing the way poor relief was administered. The poor law was never the same after the Famine. The introduction of outdoor relief as an alternative to indoor (or workhouse) relief meant that in the post-Famine period the workhouse became less central to the relief system. People could now receive assistance in their own homes in the form of either money or food without having to enter the workhouse. As a result many people who were unable to work such as the sick or disabled received regular cash allowances to support them.

By the end of the nineteenth century the workhouse had become a very different kind of institution from the one people had resorted to during the Famine. In fact almost everything that we think we know about the workhouse is wrong in the post-Famine period. We think of workhouses being desperately overcrowded but from the 1860s many workhouses were half empty leading to growing calls for some workhouses to be closed and others amalgamated. Carrickmacross workhouse, for example, was a medium-sized workhouse built to accommodate 500 people. The average daily number in the workhouse in the 1890s and 1900s was 125. We think of workhouses being full of family groups, and we imagine the torment of parents being separated from their children. But outside the major cities, workhouses contained very few families. Inmates were mainly single people, or women with children who were either permanently or temporarily separated from their husbands. We think of people entering the workhouse as if they were entering a prison, spending years incarcerated behind the grim walls and eventually dying there friendless and alone. Yet the vast majority of people admitted to workhouses stayed for short periods; days or weeks rather than months or years. These included the growing numbers who used workhouses as overnight accommodation while travelling the country in search of work. There were long-term residents but these tended to be elderly and infirm people who had no-one to care for them, single mothers, or children without families. Workhouse inmates were for the most part the marginalized and excluded; people who fallen through the cracks in society, easily ignored and easily forgotten. (More information on admission to and life in the workhouse can be found in my recent book, Poverty and the Poor Law in Ireland 1850-1914 published by Liverpool University Press, 2013).

So while I welcome the plans both to restore Carrickmacross workhouse along with others around the country (Lisanaskea, Bawnboy etc.,) and to memorialize the Famine dead, and I wish those campaigns every success, I hope that the organizers will remember all the people admitted to those workhouses, and not just those forced to take shelter there during the Famine.